Should Children be Allowed to Use Google During Their Exams?

Professor Eric Mazur, the Dean of Applied Physics at Harvard University, certainly thinks so.  He has argued that simply asking children to memorise facts is of little use in the real world where children can use Google to search for information in seconds.  He suggests that less time should be spent teaching children facts and more time invested in gaining a deeper understanding of subjects.

The OCR exam board chief executive Mark Dawe agrees, arguing in this article that the use of Google will allow teachers to assess how children apply their learning.  This line of thinking however is not without its critics.  Chris McGovern the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education believes the idea will lead to a "dumbing down of standards".

I can see both sides to this argument.  Working in the Primary sector it is all too obvious that children lack digital literacy skills.  They are wholly unprepared to take even a cursorily critical view of the information they retrieve from the internet and it is certainly a skill that is necessary in later life.

Hopefully the new primary computing curriculum will go some way to closing the digital skills gap but whether allowing students to use Google during exams will result in deeper learning or questions answered from Wiki Answers remains to be seen.