Pencils and paper notebooks are returning to classrooms after a strong bet on digital resulted in worse academic performance. For a period, it was thought that these traditional materials were no longer necessary and that the future of education necessarily involved computers and digital textbooks.
However, the results showed the opposite. Academic performance fell significantly, as demonstrated by Portugal's poor results in PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment by the OECD.
This international assessment program has been showing that the transition to digital has not brought the expected benefits for student learning. What was presented as the "brave new world" of education was clearly failed given the practical results obtained.
