Opinion
Ed-Tech Policy Opinion

How Do We Know If Ed Tech Even Works?

By Britt Neuhaus, Philip Oreopoulos & Thomas J. Kane — June 05, 2018 4 min read
BRIC ARCHIVE
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

In April, the newest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores once again showed minimal progress in U.S. math and reading achievement and a widening achievement gap between our highest and lowest performers. Against this backdrop, educators today are eager for solutions that have long seemed elusive to age-old challenges in education.

Education technology will be part of the solution. Technology today allows teachers to adapt instruction to wide-ranging student needs. Students can use software to receive rapid, specific feedback and work through richer, more realistic problems. Education technology is now ubiquitous in many U.S. classrooms—with annual pre-K-12 spending on software reaching a staggering $8.3 billion, according to a 2015 estimate from the Software and Information Industry Association.

Yet we cannot be blind to the risks. Cash-strapped schools may be tempted to purchase software to keep their most troublesome students occupied, rather than to actually teach them. Today, a majority of products are purchased with no evidence of efficacy. Based on a survey of more than 500 school and district leaders conducted by a 2016 EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium working group, only 11 percent of those responsible for making education-technology adoption decisions demand peer-reviewed research.

Cash-strapped schools may be tempted to purchase software to keep their most troublesome students occupied, rather than to actually teach them."

Too often, there is usually no plan to learn whether the implemented technology is helping or hurting student learning. Our collective failure to learn what is and is not working may be one of the largest barriers to achieving more rapid progress in U.S. education today.

But this problem can be solved. In 1962, the federal government revolutionized medicine by requiring that drugs undergo rigorous testing before they could be marketed and sold. We have made rapid progress in medicine because we have committed ourselves to systematically evaluating the impact of medical treatments, winnowing down to those with a proven impact, and scaling up only interventions that work. Drug developers always think their new treatments work—until they are found to be ineffective or even harmful.

Likewise, education leaders, developers, and philanthropists are convinced their ed-tech products will help. But when they are wrong, it is our children who pay the price. Particularly for vulnerable students, every hour of instructional time counts. If schools invest resources and time into a software that isn’t working, some students may not have a second chance. On the flip side, truly effective programs may languish unnoticed, even if they could help students at a massive scale.

If we are serious about helping students learn, we have an obligation to test educational technology before widespread adoption. But a lack of analytic expertise within school agencies, coupled with the misperception that evaluations are too expensive or take years before results, may make districts wary of evaluation.

This is beginning to change, as leading school districts partner with university-based research centers to conduct rigorous evaluations that capture both timely, short-term outcomes and critical longer-term metrics like graduation rates and college attendance. Over the past 15 years, schools have also built advanced data systems that can drive down costs of data collection and facilitate comparisons between students who are using a specific program with similar students who are not.

Another barrier to ed-tech evaluation has been the classic free-rider problem: Although every school would benefit from knowing whether something works, no single district wants to bear the cost of finding out. Fortunately, a growing number of foundations have taken the lead to try to correct this problem. Among them, the Overdeck Family Foundation (where Britt Neuhaus serves as a program officer), the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are all funding efforts to evaluate what is effective—and what is not.

Finally, there’s a pressing need for cultural change among school district leaders to recognize their obligation to rigorously evaluate the education technologies they are adopting. As gatekeepers of school procurement, district leaders should insist that contractors provide rigorous evidence. Even when presented with evidence, district leaders should build rigorous evaluation and performance targets into any contract before implementing a new product at scale. They should initially pilot the software in a subset of schools, establish a comparison group, and only pay the full contract if the students outperform the comparisons by the promised amount.

If we commit to systematic and rigorous evaluation, we may find that certain technologies can truly help make massive inroads in learning. We already have promising evidence that some programs, when paired with thoughtful implementation and supports, can have powerful impacts. For example, randomized evaluations found that ASSISTments—a virtual math-homework support—significantly improved math scores despite only being used for about 10 minutes several days a week. Students with low prior math achievement benefited the most.

Imagine what we might uncover if we committed to evaluating the impact of every technology that comes through our schools and scaling up the most effective programs to the benefit of all our students.

A version of this article appeared in the June 06, 2018 edition of Education Week as Who Decides If Ed Tech Even Works?

Events

School & District Management Webinar EdMarketer Quick Hit: What’s Trending among K-12 Leaders?
What issues are keeping K-12 leaders up at night? Join us for EdMarketer Quick Hit: What’s Trending among K-12 Leaders?
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Artificial Intelligence Webinar
Teaching Students to Use Artificial Intelligence Ethically
Ready to embrace AI in your classroom? Join our master class to learn how to use AI as a tool for learning, not a replacement.
Content provided by Solution Tree
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Teaching Webinar
Empowering Students Using Computational Thinking Skills
Empower your students with computational thinking. Learn how to integrate these skills into your teaching and boost student engagement.
Content provided by Project Lead The Way

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Ed-Tech Policy Ed. Dept. Recommends These 3 Principles to Develop School Cellphone Policies
Cellphone policies should be developed in consultation with students, teachers, and parents, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said.
4 min read
Photograph of a white teen using a cellphone in the classroom.
iStock/Getty
Ed-Tech Policy Need Guidance on How to Avoid AI Pitfalls? New Resources Aim to Help Schools
The U.S. Department of Education has released new resources for schools on AI that include recommendations on some thorny issues.
4 min read
Photo illustration of teacher using AI for grading.
iStock
Ed-Tech Policy Opinion How to Become an Ed-Tech Visionary Without Really Trying
Beware of PR grifters eager to turn education pros into A-list-worthy celebs. (And read the fine print.)
4 min read
The United States Capitol building as a bookcase filled with red, white, and blue policy books in a Washington DC landscape.
Luca D'Urbino for Education Week
Ed-Tech Policy Should Schools Have Cellphone Restrictions for Teachers Too?
Schools expect teachers to model responsible cellphone use.
4 min read
Illustration of a young woman turning off her mobile phone which is even bigger than she is.
iStock/Getty