One Laptop per Child: Two Randomised Trials, Ten Years, and No Effect on Learning

Most educational technology arrives, gets adopted, and is never properly evaluated. One Laptop per Child is the rare exception. It made a specific, testable promise, it was deployed at scale, and it was subjected to two large randomised controlled trials with a ten-year follow-up.

We therefore know the answer to a question that is usually left open. The answer is not the one the programme expected.

What was promised

Nicholas Negroponte announced the initiative in 2005: a rugged, cheap, low-power laptop, designed for children who could not yet read, distributed to the world’s poorest schoolchildren, with the explicit aim of transforming education. The machine was known from the start as the “$100 laptop”, and that number did most of the rhetorical work.

Two facts about the delivery are reasonably well attested. Around three million machines were eventually manufactured, with Uruguay and Peru accounting for most of them. And the laptop never sold at $100.

We are not printing a figure for what it actually cost. Contemporary press reports and later retrospectives give materially different numbers - one retrospective interview puts it near $130, a 2007 news report put it at $200 - and we could not resolve the discrepancy against a primary record. The verified claim is narrower and sufficient: the announced price was not reached.

The first randomised trial: no effect on maths or language

Cristia, Ibarrarán, Cueto, Santiago and Severín (2017), in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, evaluated the Peruvian deployment after 15 months across 318 rural primary schools.

The programme worked as an access intervention. Computers per student in treatment schools rose from 0.12 to 1.18 - a roughly tenfold increase - and this “translated into substantial increases in use of computers both at school and at home.” Whatever else went wrong, the laptops arrived and were used.

The learning result, in the authors’ own words: “No evidence is found of effects on test scores in math and language. There is some evidence, though inconclusive, about positive effects on general cognitive skills.”

That last clause kept a certain amount of hope alive for the better part of a decade.

The ten-year follow-up closed it

Cueto, Beuermann, Cristia, Malamud and Pardo (2024) returned to the same experiment and tracked outcomes over ten years, from 2009 to 2019, across 531 rural schools - 296 treatment, 235 control - using national examination data from 2009 to 2016 plus grade progression and educational attainment.

The precision here is what makes it decisive. This is not a study that failed to find an effect because it was too small to detect one. It is a study that can rule effects out:

the results “rule out positive statistically significant effects larger than 0.05 and 0.03 standard deviations in mathematics and reading, respectively.”

Grade progression showed a negative effect of 1.0 percentage point - individually insignificant, barely significant at the 10% level once multiple testing is accounted for. Effects on years of schooling were negative and insignificant.

The authors also tested the “general cognitive skills” hope from 2017 and it did not survive. Students showed digital skill gains of 0.4 standard deviations - they genuinely learned to use a computer - but “no positive effects on… cognitive skills based on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, verbal fluency, and coding tests.”

Their explanation is mundane and probably correct. Teachers reported only small increases in laptop use for academic purposes, despite having received training. The hardware reached the children. The teaching did not change around it.

Romania: the same intervention, and grades went down

The Peru result is sometimes read as a story about deployment failure in a poor rural school system. A separate natural experiment makes that reading harder to sustain.

Malamud and Pop-Eleches (2011), in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, studied Romania’s Euro 200 programme, which in 2008 issued roughly 35,484 vouchers worth about €200 towards a home computer, allocated by a strict income cutoff. That cutoff creates a clean comparison between families just above and just below the line. The authors surveyed 3,354 households in 2009.

The vouchers worked as intended: home computer ownership rose by 54.6 percentage points and computer use by 3.4 hours a week.

The academic results:

Outcome	Effect
Maths GPA	-0.435 points (95% CI -0.776 to -0.094), about 0.3 SD
Romanian GPA	-0.562 points (95% CI -0.925 to -0.199), about 0.4 SD
English GPA	-0.634 points (95% CI -1.075 to -0.193), about 0.42 SD
Behaviour grades	no significant effect

“Children who won a voucher to purchase a computer had significantly lower school grades.”

And now the complication that makes this more interesting than a simple cautionary tale. The same children scored higher on cognitive and computer tests:

• Raven’s Progressive Matrices: +0.327 SD (95% CI 0.059 to 0.595)
• Computer skills test: +0.268 SD (95% CI 0.040 to 0.496)

The time-use data explain the trade. Reporting at least an hour a day of homework fell by 9.6 percentage points; at least an hour of reading fell by 9.3 points; at least an hour of television fell by 7.0 points. The authors note that the additional computer time “was mostly spent playing games.” Only 9% of households had educational software, despite government provision.

One further finding is genuinely actionable, and it is the only thing in either study that is: parental rules about homework roughly halved the negative effect on maths grades. Rules about computer use, by contrast, successfully cut computer time by 3.2 hours a week without improving grades at all. Limiting the device did nothing; protecting the homework did something.

Note that Peru found no Raven’s gain while Romania found one. These are different populations, ages, devices and durations, and we are not going to reconcile them by picking a favourite. The consistent finding across both is the one that matters: digital skill improved, academic attainment did not.

What the programme got wrong

Not the hardware. The machine shipped, it survived rural conditions well enough to be used, and children learned to operate it.

What failed was the theory of change. OLPC’s premise was that access was the binding constraint - that children were held back by not having a computer, and that removing that obstacle would let learning follow. Both experiments put the computer in the child’s hands and both found that access was not the constraint. In Peru the teaching did not reorganise around the device. In Romania the device competed successfully with homework and reading and won.

This is a different question from whether laptops help university students taking notes in lectures, which is its own literature with its own answer, and a different question again from whether removing phones from schools improves learning, which is measured separately and is also less impressive than advertised. What OLPC tested was the distribution of hardware as an educational intervention in its own right, and it is the cleanest test of that idea anyone has run.

Limitations and disputes

• The Peru and Romania studies disagree about cognitive skills. Romania found a Raven’s gain of about a third of a standard deviation; the Peru ten-year follow-up found none. Both are reported here; neither is discounted.
• Malamud and Pop-Eleches acknowledge recall bias in retrospective time-use reports, a 52% survey response rate, and that their estimates are intention-to-treat rather than effects of actual usage intensity.
• The Peru follow-up relies on teacher and student self-reports for the classroom-adoption explanation.
• These are studies of specific programmes in specific places. Neither shows that computers cannot help children learn. They show that these distributions, in these systems, did not raise attainment.
• The unit cost of the XO laptop is not reported here because the available sources conflict and none is primary.
• Nothing here evaluates the OLPC software or the constructionist pedagogy behind it, only the outcomes the trials measured.