Effect of Tablet Use on Teachers' Lesson Preparation and Teaching Effectiveness in Primary Schools: A Scoping Review

Abstract

In November 2022 the Government of Tanzania issued about 293,400 tablets to teachers in public primary and secondary schools. The aim was to modernise how teachers prepare and teach. Four years on, little is known about what teachers do with these devices, and still less about whether tablet use saves preparation time, widens the range of teaching methods or improves the assessment tasks that the competence-based curriculum demands. This scoping review mapped evidence on three relationships: (a) storing and organising teaching resources on tablets and the time teachers spend preparing lessons; (b) online searching and artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the variety of teaching methods teachers use; and (c) tablet use and teachers' ability to develop competence-based questions and assessment tasks. The review followed the Arksey and O'Malley framework, as refined by Levac and colleagues and the JBI, and is reported against PRISMA-ScR. Web-indexed searches and citation tracking identified 239 records. Nineteen sources met the inclusion criteria and were charted by context, design and objective. Six sources came from Tanzania, six from elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, one from another low- or middle-income country and six were international reviews or studies from high-income settings. Tanzanian studies show that teachers use tablets mainly to search for and download materials; few use them to write lesson plans, and classroom observation often finds devices unused during lessons. Studies from Sierra Leone and Uganda suggest that AI tools accessed by phone or tablet can support lesson planning at low data cost, but none has measured preparation time or changes in teaching methods directly. Evidence on assessment is thinnest: Tanzanian primary teachers struggle to write higher-order questions, and automatic question generation is promising but untested in Tanzanian classrooms. The evidence describes use but rarely measures effect. Tablets appear to change where teachers find materials more than how they plan, teach or assess. Research that measures preparation time, observes teaching and evaluates tablet-supported assessment design is needed before strong claims are made.