The pace of research vs. technology innovation is another issue. The report notes that because educational technology is always evolving and improving, and research studies can take years, educators should “consider studies conducted on previous product versions, as well as those conducted with other populations and in other settings.”
What’s important, says the report, is to build rigorous evaluation strategies into earlier field tests and pilot projects to help expedite the process.
Finally, funding ed-tech research traditionally has presented a problem, with large education agencies often too busy to review every product and companies having to pay for the research themselves—leading to what might appear as a biased view of the product.
“An educator may find less formally reported studies that have value, and may also have the option of conducting a pilot to obtain useful evidence locally,” says the report. “Such pilots can often be funded through the set-aside percentage for evaluation in many federal and other grant programs that pay for the technology purchase.”
Guidelines for high-quality ed-tech research
The report’s guidelines aim to “describe standards of best practice for the conduct and reporting of evaluation research on technology-based products and services.”
According to the guidelines, both ed-tech companies and educators should try to…
- Ask the right research question and choose effective outcome measures.
- Fully support the implementation of the product or service.
- Plan a study of sufficient size and duration to demonstrate an effect.
- Plan for plausible causal claims.
- Avoid (the appearance of) conflicts of interest.
- Provide a comprehensive and detailed research report.
- Make the research findings widely available.
- Accurately translate the research for customers or stakeholders.
The full report provides much more detail about each of these considerations.
SIIA is hoping for broad distribution of the guidelines, “because one of its main goals is to improve the credibility of publisher-sponsored research,” Newman said. However, owing to the improvement of data systems at the district and state levels, it’s “increasingly easy for districts to conduct their own high-quality evaluations of programs they’ve implemented.”
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