The presentation of the results of the Invalsi test, which took place yesterday, tells and confirms a truth that I have been denouncing for years in my books and on my social media profiles: school learning is constantly worsening. It has been noted from many quarters that the digitalisation of learning environments has made students pay a high price in all nations of the world. CJust like the Invalsi test, the results of the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) study which takes place every three years throughout the world have highlighted in the latest findings that as the time spent by students interacting with a digital screen during school hours increased, there was a clear worsening of the test score. Similar studies carried out around the world lead to unambiguous conclusions: that is, the more time spent on a screen during the school day increases, the worse the result achieved on the standardized test by students belonging to that school system.
This is what emerged both with the TIMSS study (which provides reliable and updated data on the performance of US students in mathematics and science, comparing them with those of students in other countries) and with the PIRLS study conducted every five years, starting from 2001, by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). In particular, the 2023 PIRLSS study, carried out on 150,000 American 9-year-old primary school children showed that even a minimal amount of daily time spent staying connected within a class (meaning a duration of no more than half an hour) correlates with worse performance in fourth grade children in reading and text comprehension tasks. This conclusion also has an analogy with the results of the Invalsi test presented yesterday, which highlight an unprecedented decline in the academic skills of primary school children.
The only areas that seem to work are those related to English skills and digital skills. Compared to the latter, Invalsi records progress in all education cycles with large groups of students, especially the older ones, reaching the advanced level. Now this last fact must push us to make a critical reflection. In recent years, supporters of digital school have always attributed the collapse of contemporary learning to the fact that such learning should have improved thanks to digital school, but this improvement did not occur due to the lack of digital skills on the part of the students themselves. The consequence? More and more digital offerings in the classroom and digital training for teachers.
Today, the results of the Invalsi test seem to tell us another truth: digital skills are all there, in all school levels, but they do not serve to produce the learning for which they are continually invoked by the proponents of digital school. It’s time to produce a new thought: schools today need less digital. There is a need to reinforce analogue learning. The slogan “Learn digital” is a mantra that we must learn to abandon. The Invalsi data clearly shows this. I will never tire of pointing out how in recent years, the nations of Northern Europe have made a complete U-turn in this sense. The very people who had pushed digital school to the maximum, today promote learning environments decontaminated by the presence of digital, encouraging de-tabletisation in all school levels and the reintroduction of paper books and the paper-pencil method. Let’s be clear: this is not longing for a vintage school, or the school as it was.
This means offering those who grow up learning environments that respond to the needs associated with correct neurodevelopment and functional to the wiring of neural networks in the brain in developmental age, supportive of learning functions, which today are evidently deficient and weakened by a digital environment that has offered stimulation and has not favored tasks such as concentration, attention and memorization of crucial importance for generating quality learning. As a specialist of the mind in developmental age, I hope that reading the results of the Invalsi test represents a further stimulus to push, in our nation, for the promotion of interventions in schools, truly functional to the learning and development needs of our male and female students. Perhaps the enormous push that is also being given to the introduction of scholastic intelligence in learning contexts, also in light of this objective evidence, should be completely rethought.
