Special Report: eSchools Work!

Setting the record straight on ed-tech efficacy

By Gregg W. Downey, editor
Read more by Gregg Downey

In spite of what you might have heard or read in the general press lately, the evidence is in, and it’s overwhelming: eSchools work!

Substantial research–not to mention anecdotes galore–demonstrates the efficacy of educational technology. Trouble is, it’s been hard to lay your hands on all that evidence without resorting to a tedious search of the internet–or pawing through back issues of eSchool News, the print newspaper.

Not to worry.

Next time you’re tapped to defend the technology budget at a superintendent’s cabinet meeting, faculty congress assembly, legislativehearing, or school board meeting, you won’t have scramble quite so frantically.

That’s because the editors of eSchool News, with financial support from Discovery Education, have aggregated the keydocumentation you’ll need to start setting the record straight.

Make no mistake: Even the greatest technology is no substitute for fine pedagogy, excellent instruction, and prudent management. To workeffectively, educational technology requires solid professional development, careful implementation, and consistent maintenance and support. But you knew that.

Those elements are what you must provide. In the meantime, please refer to our brand-new Special Report (it also starts below) to find many of the resources that will help youcounter the misinformation floating around about ed tech.

Effective ed tech is available. And it’s the reason … eSchools Work!

– Gregg W. Downey, editor

An eSchool News Special Report …

eSchools Work!
Discovering the positive power of educational technology
From eSchool News staff reports

In April, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) set off a firestorm in the ed-tech community when it released a report showing that the use of certain software programs to help teach reading and math in some 439 classrooms did not lead to higher test scores after a year of implementation. (See: ED study slams software efficacy.)

Read the report, and it’s easy to see why: Average use of the programs accounted for only about 10 or 11 percent of the total instructional time for the entire school year–well below what the products were designed for. But that fact didn’t stop much of the press from leaping to the too-hasty conclusion that educational technology simply isn’t working. (See: Repeaters, not reporters.)

The fallout from the report, and the coverage it has received from the general press, already is being felt in school systems from coast to coast–creating a backlash against school technology in many communities. As the head of one prominent ed-tech organization told eSchool News "I am hearing from teachers that they are getting calls from parents about those headlines–the parents are taking the headlines at face value, and the teachers don’t know how to respond."

Nobody says the report should be dismissed altogether. But, as with the negative image of a photograph, ed-tech advocates believe the report’s true value lies in its "white spaces"; that is, what is most revealing is not what did happen in the classrooms that were studied, but what didn’t happen: Teachers weren’t comfortable with the technology, there was an absence of effective leadership in many of the schools, and the software wasn’t used as often as it should have been.

While these results certainly point to the need for better software implementation in the nation’s schools, they hardly attest to the effectiveness of the technology itself. And, as eSchool News can testify after nearly a decade of reporting on educational technology, there is actually a mountain of evidence to suggest that, under the right circumstances, technology can make a difference.

That fact was confirmed in a recent "metastudy," or study of studies, that set out to determine what the balance of existing research says about technology’s impact on learning. After reviewing dozens of research reports, education researcher Cheryl Lemke of the Metiri Group concluded that, when implemented "with fidelity," technology does, indeed, provide a "small, but significant" increase in learning across all content areas.

In an interview with eSchool News, Lemke explained what is meant by the term "with fidelity":

"There’s a piece of software that has great research on it for struggling readers, called Fast ForWord," she said. "And the way the company suggests that it be used is for … six to eight weeks, for 100 minutes a day. Many educators, when we talk to them, say, ‘Oh, Fast ForWord doesn’t work,’ and when we probe a little bit, they’ll say back to us, ‘Well, we didn’t really have the computers to use it for 100 minutes a day, so instead we used it for 25 minutes every other day’–and that’s not the way it’s prescribed; it’s not being used with fidelity, so it’s not working."

Lemke added: "There is a sense that it’s easy to put technology into schools, and we know that there’s no easy answer. … [Companies] introduced technology into the business world in the 1960s, and it took them three decades before they saw a bump in productivity–and the reason for that is, they did the ‘same old, same old’ with the new technology. It took them a while to really change the way they were doing business, and the same thing is true with education. [Stakeholders] need to give [schools] a chance to … make that shift in the way they do the business of education before we’ll actually [see] that spike."

In schools that have made that shift–in communities where there is strong leadership, a clear vision for using technology to improve education, sustained professional development in the use of technology to transform instructional practices, and ongoing evaluation and support–students and teachers are achieving remarkable results, as the following pages suggest.

In this Special Report, we’ve highlighted stories from the eSchool News archives that document such ed-tech achievements and the research that validates them. We’ve also included some advice on how to lobby effectively for school technology in your own communities, as well as the keys to successful school software implementation.

Our coverage includes proof of success of a program, called eMINTS (Enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies), that has been so successful, it’s now being replicated in at least nine other states. Our Special Report includes evidence of success for Maine’s school laptop program; an Arkansas program that combines technology with authentic, community-based problem solving; a link between strong media center programs in Colorado and gains in student achievement; and much more.

Reading these reports should put to rest the false idea that educational technology simply doesn’t work. Read more…