Human or technological resources? A dilemma in education provision

Results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA2012) of the OECD conclude that two of the strong education performers countries, Finland and Korea, have been able to effectively educate every child regardless their socioeconomic level. To do so, each country has implemented different strategies, leading to very different forms of education provision. While Finnish emphasise on high trained and empowered teachers, student early intervention and weekly (multidisciplinary) team teachers meetings, Koreans encourage student hard work (in and out of school) and active learning by integrating ICTs in their daily learning (digital textbooks and cyber-home) which is complemented with parent support/interest. These two ways of providing education clearly raises the question of the role played by human resources and/or technology in education provision. To do so, we use each countries individual sample of the PISA-2012 database at student and school levels, and given the nested nature of the data, we employ multilevel models. Estimations have been made from a comparative approach, in a case-to-case basis. Results suggest that human resources and technology influence student outcomes in both cases. Yet, for both countries a common set of technologies influence the overall set of outcomes.