School & District Management

Schools Making Less Progress on Ed. Tech. Goals

By Katie Ash — August 11, 2011 1 min read
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The Software Industry and Information Association has released the final results of its annual Vision K-20 survey, which found a slight decline in K-20 progress toward key education technology goals and benchmarks compared to previous years.

The SIIA 2011 Vision K-20 survey asked participants to self-assess their progress on 20 benchmarks—such as access to high-speed broadband Internet and high-quality online courses. This year, about 500 educational institutions, 90 percent of which serve K-12 students, responded.

The average score dropped slightly from 62 to 60, out of a score of 100 total points. “Though slight, the decline in scores is disappointing. This is not a surprise as it has been an especially challenging year for education with the economic downturn and decreased budgets. And it will not be easy to close the gap between the current low use of computer-based assessments and the upcoming common core online-testing requirements,” said Karen Billings, the vice president for education at SIIA, in a press release.

Overall, smaller institutions (those with 450 students or less) scored lower on the benchmarks than very large institutions (those with 7,500 students or more). The biggest challenges for schools overall was helping schools meet the personalized needs of all students and differentiating learning, as well as providing timely, authentic, robust assessment tools.

If all this sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because Ian Quillen, my co-blogger here at Digital Education, posted an entry about this survey during the 2011 ISTE conference, where SIIA released preliminary results from the survey.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Digital Education blog.