How Technology Help Me Learn
Leading up to the 75th ceremony of the UN Full general Assembly, this "Realizing the promise: How can education technology ameliorate learning for all?" publication kicks off the Middle for Universal Education'south outset playbook in a series to assist amend education effectually the world.
It is intended as an bear witness-based tool for ministries of education, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to adopt and more successfully invest in education engineering.
While there is no single instruction initiative that will reach the aforementioned results everywhere—as school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies—an important first step is agreement how engineering science is used given specific local contexts and needs.
The surveys in this playbook are designed to be adapted to collect this data from educators, learners, and school leaders and guide decisionmakers in expanding the use of technology.
Introduction
While engineering has disrupted most sectors of the economy and changed how we communicate, access information, work, and even play, its impact on schools, didactics, and learning has been much more express. We believe that this express impact is primarily due to engineering being been used to replace analog tools, without much consideration given to playing to technology'southward comparative advantages. These comparative advantages, relative to traditional "chalk-and-talk" classroom instruction, include helping to scale up standardized education, facilitate differentiated instruction, expand opportunities for practise, and increase student engagement. When schools apply applied science to enhance the work of educators and to improve the quality and quantity of educational content, learners will thrive.
Further, COVID-19 has laid blank that, in today's environment where pandemics and the furnishings of climate change are likely to occur, schools cannot always provide in-person educational activity—making the example for investing in teaching technology.
Here we argue for a simple notwithstanding surprisingly rare approach to education technology that seeks to:
- Sympathise the needs, infrastructure, and capacity of a school system—the diagnosis;
- Survey the best available evidence on interventions that match those conditions—the evidence; and
- Closely monitor the results of innovations before they are scaled upward—the prognosis.
The framework
Our approach builds on a simple yet intuitive theoretical framework created two decades ago by two of the about prominent education researchers in the United states of america, David K. Cohen and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. They debate that what matters about to improve learning is the interactions amid educators and learners around educational materials. We believe that the failed school-improvement efforts in the U.S. that motivated Cohen and Brawl'south framework resemble the ed-tech reforms in much of the developing world to date in the lack of clarity improving the interactions between educators, learners, and the educational material. Nosotros build on their framework by adding parents as central agents that mediate the relationships betwixt learners and educators and the material (Effigy one).
Effigy 1: The instructional core
Adapted from Cohen and Ball (1999)
As the figure above suggests, ed-tech interventions tin can bear on the instructional core in a myriad of ways. Yet, just because technology can do something, information technology does non mean it should. School systems in developing countries differ along many dimensions and each system is likely to have different needs for ed-tech interventions, too as different infrastructure and chapters to enact such interventions.
The diagnosis:
How can schoolhouse systems appraise their needs and preparedness?
A useful first step for whatsoever school organization to determine whether information technology should invest in teaching technology is to diagnose its:
- Specific needs to improve student learning (e.1000., raising the boilerplate level of accomplishment, remediating gaps among low performers, and challenging high performers to develop college-society skills);
- Infrastructure to adopt technology-enabled solutions (due east.thou., electricity connection, availability of space and outlets, stock of computers, and Net connectivity at school and at learners' homes); and
- Capacity to integrate technology in the instructional process (e.thousand., learners' and educators' level of familiarity and condolement with hardware and software, their beliefs virtually the level of usefulness of engineering science for learning purposes, and their current uses of such engineering science).
Before engaging in any new information collection exercise, schoolhouse systems should take total reward of existing administrative data that could shed light on these 3 main questions. This could be in the grade of internal evaluations just also international learner assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and/or the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the Education and Learning International Written report (TALIS). Only if school systems lack information on their preparedness for ed-tech reforms or if they seek to complement existing data with a richer prepare of indicators, we developed a set of surveys for learners, educators, and school leaders. Download the full report to encounter how we map out the main aspects covered past these surveys, in hopes of highlighting how they could be used to inform decisions around the adoption of ed-tech interventions.
The show:
How can school systems place promising ed-tech interventions?
At that place is no single "ed-tech" initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere, just considering school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies. Instead, to realize the potential of education engineering to accelerate student learning, decisionmakers should focus on four potential uses of technology that play to its comparative advantages and complement the work of educators to accelerate student learning (Figure 2). These comparative advantages include:
- Scaling upwardly quality instruction, such as through prerecorded quality lessons.
- Facilitating differentiated instruction, through, for example, calculator-adaptive learning and live 1-on-i tutoring.
- Expanding opportunities to practice.
- Increasing learner engagement through videos and games.
Figure 2: Comparative advantages of applied science
Adjusted from Cohen and Ball (1999)
Here nosotros review the evidence on ed-tech interventions from 37 studies in twenty countries*, organizing them by comparative advantage. It'southward important to notation that ours is not the only mode to allocate these interventions (e.g., video tutorials could be considered every bit a strategy to scale upwardly instruction or increase learner engagement), but we believe it may exist useful to highlight the needs that they could address and why engineering is well positioned to practice so.
When discussing specific studies, we report the magnitude of the effects of interventions using standard deviations (SDs). SDs are a widely used metric in research to express the result of a plan or policy with respect to a business-every bit-usual condition (eastward.chiliad., exam scores). At that place are several ways to make sense of them. 1 is to categorize the magnitude of the furnishings based on the results of impact evaluations. In developing countries, effects below 0.1 SDs are considered to be small, effects between 0.1 and 0.two SDs are medium, and those above 0.2 SDs are large (for reviews that guess the average effect of groups of interventions, chosen "meta analyses," see e.grand., Conn, 2017; Kremer, Brannen, & Glennerster, 2013; McEwan, 2014; Snilstveit et al., 2015; Evans & Yuan, 2020.)
*In surveying the evidence, we began past compiling studies from prior general and ed-tech specific evidence reviews that some of usa have written and from ed-tech reviews conducted by others. Then, we tracked the studies cited by the ones we had previously read and reviewed those, too. In identifying studies for inclusion, we focused on experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of didactics technology interventions from pre-school to secondary school in depression- and centre-income countries that were released between 2000 and 2020. Nosotros just included interventions that sought to improve pupil learning direct (i.east., students' interaction with the cloth), equally opposed to interventions that take impacted accomplishment indirectly, by reducing teacher absence or increasing parental engagement. This process yielded 37 studies in 20 countries (see the full listing of studies in Appendix B).
Scaling up standardized instruction
One of the ways in which technology may amend the quality of education is through its capacity to evangelize standardized quality content at scale. This feature of technology may be particularly useful in 3 types of settings: (a) those in "hard-to-staff" schools (i.e., schools that struggle to recruit educators with the requisite training and experience—typically, in rural and/or remote areas) (see, due east.yard., Urquiola & Vegas, 2005); (b) those in which many educators are oftentimes absent-minded from school (east.g., Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan, & Rogers, 2006; Muralidharan, Das, Holla, & Mohpal, 2017); and/or (c) those in which educators have low levels of pedagogical and bailiwick thing expertise (e.g., Bietenbeck, Piopiunik, & Wiederhold, 2018; Assuming et al., 2017; Metzler & Woessmann, 2012; Santibañez, 2006) and do not have opportunities to observe and receive feedback (e.g., Bruns, Costa, & Cunha, 2018; Cilliers, Fleisch, Prinsloo, & Taylor, 2018). Applied science could accost this problem by: (a) disseminating lessons delivered past qualified educators to a big number of learners (e.thou., through prerecorded or live lessons); (b) enabling altitude didactics (e.g., for learners in remote areas and/or during periods of school closures); and (c) distributing hardware preloaded with educational materials.
Prerecorded lessons
Engineering seems to exist well placed to dilate the impact of effective educators by disseminating their lessons. Evidence on the impact of prerecorded lessons is encouraging, but not conclusive. Some initiatives that take used curt instructional videos to complement regular instruction, in conjunction with other learning materials, have raised student learning on independent assessments. For example, Beg et al. (2020) evaluated an initiative in Punjab, Pakistan in which grade 8 classrooms received an intervention that included short videos to substitute live pedagogy, quizzes for learners to practice the material from every lesson, tablets for educators to learn the textile and follow the lesson, and LED screens to projection the videos onto a classroom screen. Subsequently six months, the intervention improved the performance of learners on contained tests of math and science by 0.nineteen and 0.24 SDs, respectively but had no discernible outcome on the math and scientific discipline section of Punjab'southward loftier-stakes exams.
One study suggests that approaches that are far less technologically sophisticated tin also improve learning outcomes—especially, if the business organization-as-usual instruction is of low quality. For example, Naslund-Hadley, Parker, and Hernandez-Agramonte (2014) evaluated a preschool math program in Cordillera, Paraguay that used audio segments and written materials four days per week for an 60 minutes per day during the school day. Subsequently five months, the intervention improved math scores past 0.16 SDs, narrowing gaps between low- and high-achieving learners, and between those with and without educators with formal grooming in early childhood education.
Yet, the integration of prerecorded material into regular instruction has non always been successful. For instance, de Barros (2020) evaluated an intervention that combined instructional videos for math and scientific discipline with infrastructure upgrades (e.g., two "smart" classrooms, ii TVs, and ii tablets), printed workbooks for students, and in-service training for educators of learners in grades 9 and x in Haryana, India (all materials were mapped onto the official curriculum). After xi months, the intervention negatively impacted math achievement (by 0.08 SDs) and had no effect on scientific discipline (with respect to concern as usual classes). It reduced the share of lesson time that educators devoted to pedagogy and negatively impacted an alphabetize of instructional quality. Likewise, Seo (2017) evaluated several combinations of infrastructure (solar lights and TVs) and prerecorded videos (in English and/or bilingual) for grade 11 students in northern Tanzania and establish that none of the variants improved educatee learning, even when the videos were used. The written report reports effects from the infrastructure component across variants, simply as others accept noted (Muralidharan, Romero, & Wüthrich, 2019), this arroyo to estimating impact is problematic.
A very similar intervention delivered after school hours, however, had sizeable effects on learners' bones skills. Chiplunkar, Dhar, and Nagesh (2020) evaluated an initiative in Chennai (the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu, Bharat) delivered past the same system as in a higher place that combined short videos that explained key concepts in math and science with worksheets, facilitator-led instruction, small-scale groups for peer-to-peer learning, and occasional career counseling and guidance for course 9 students. These lessons took place after school for one hour, 5 times a week. After x months, information technology had large furnishings on learners' achievement as measured by tests of basic skills in math and reading, merely no effect on a standardized loftier-stakes test in grade 10 or socio-emotional skills (e.one thousand., teamwork, decisionmaking, and communication).
Drawing general lessons from this body of research is challenging for at least two reasons. First, all of the studies above have evaluated the impact of prerecorded lessons combined with several other components (e.g., hardware, print materials, or other activities). Therefore, it is possible that the furnishings found are due to these additional components, rather than to the recordings themselves, or to the interaction betwixt the two (see Muralidharan, 2017 for a give-and-take of the challenges of interpreting "bundled" interventions). 2d, while these studies evaluate some type of prerecorded lessons, none examines the content of such lessons. Thus, information technology seems entirely plausible that the direction and magnitude of the effects depends largely on the quality of the recordings (east.g., the expertise of the educator recording it, the amount of preparation that went into planning the recording, and its alignment with best education practices).
These studies likewise enhance iii important questions worth exploring in future research. Ane of them is why none of the interventions discussed higher up had effects on high-stakes exams, even if their materials are typically mapped onto the official curriculum. It is possible that the official curricula are simply too challenging for learners in these settings, who are several grade levels backside expectations and who frequently need to reinforce basic skills (see Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Some other question is whether these interventions accept long-term effects on teaching practices. It seems plausible that, if these interventions are deployed in contexts with low teaching quality, educators may learn something from watching the videos or listening to the recordings with learners. Withal some other question is whether these interventions arrive easier for schools to deliver instruction to learners whose native language is other than the official medium of pedagogy.
Distance educational activity
Applied science tin can as well allow learners living in remote areas to access education. The evidence on these initiatives is encouraging. For example, Johnston and Ksoll (2017) evaluated a program that broadcasted live teaching via satellite to rural master school students in the Volta and Greater Accra regions of Republic of ghana. For this purpose, the program also equipped classrooms with the applied science needed to connect to a studio in Accra, including solar panels, a satellite modem, a projector, a webcam, microphones, and a figurer with interactive software. Afterward two years, the intervention improved the numeracy scores of students in grades ii through iv, and some foundational literacy tasks, merely information technology had no consequence on attendance or classroom time devoted to instruction, as captured past school visits. The authors interpreted these results as suggesting that the gains in achievement may be due to improving the quality of instruction that children received (equally opposed to increased instructional time). Naik, Chitre, Bhalla, and Rajan (2019) evaluated a similar program in the Indian country of Karnataka and also plant positive effects on learning outcomes, but it is not articulate whether those effects are due to the program or due to differences in the groups of students they compared to estimate the touch of the initiative.
In ane context (Mexico), this blazon of distance education had positive long-term effects. Navarro-Sola (2019) took advantage of the staggered rollout of the telesecundarias (i.e., center schools with lessons broadcasted through satellite TV) in 1968 to approximate its impact. The policy had brusk-term effects on students' enrollment in school: For every telesecundaria per 50 children, 10 students enrolled in centre schoolhouse and 2 pursued farther teaching. It also had a long-term influence on the educational and employment trajectory of its graduates. Each boosted year of education induced by the policy increased boilerplate income by nearly 18 percentage. This consequence was attributable to more graduates inbound the labor force and shifting from agriculture and the breezy sector. Similarly, Fabregas (2019) leveraged a after expansion of this policy in 1993 and establish that each additional telesecundaria per 1,000 adolescents led to an average increase of 0.ii years of didactics, and a decline in fertility for women, simply no conclusive bear witness of long-term effects on labor market outcomes.
It is crucial to translate these results keeping in heed the settings where the interventions were implemented. As we mention to a higher place, part of the reason why they have proven effective is that the "counterfactual" conditions for learning (i.e., what would have happened to learners in the absence of such programs) was either to non take admission to schooling or to exist exposed to low-quality education. Schoolhouse systems interested in taking upwardly similar interventions should assess the extent to which their learners (or parts of their learner population) find themselves in similar weather to the subjects of the studies above. This illustrates the importance of assessing the needs of a system before reviewing the evidence.
Preloaded hardware
Technology also seems well positioned to disseminate educational materials. Specifically, hardware (eastward.m., desktop computers, laptops, or tablets) could also help deliver educational software (e.yard., discussion processing, reference texts, and/or games). In theory, these materials could not only undergo a quality balls review (e.yard., past curriculum specialists and educators), but too draw on the interactions with learners for adjustments (e.g., identifying areas needing reinforcement) and enable interactions between learners and educators.
In practice, nevertheless, most initiatives that take provided learners with free computers, laptops, and netbooks do non leverage whatsoever of the opportunities mentioned above. Instead, they install a standard ready of educational materials and hope that learners observe them helpful enough to take them upwardly on their own. Students rarely do so, and instead use the laptops for recreational purposes—ofttimes, to the detriment of their learning (see, e.g., Malamud & Pop-Eleches, 2011). In fact, costless netbook initiatives accept non only consistently failed to improve academic accomplishment in math or language (e.yard., Cristia et al., 2017), but they have had no touch on on learners' full general estimator skills (eastward.k., Beuermann et al., 2015). Some of these initiatives have had small-scale impacts on cognitive skills, but the mechanisms through which those furnishings occurred remains unclear.
To our noesis, the only successful deployment of a complimentary laptop initiative was one in which a team of researchers equipped the computers with remedial software. Mo et al. (2013) evaluated a version of the Ane Laptop per Child (OLPC) plan for grade 3 students in migrant schools in Beijing, People's republic of china in which the laptops were loaded with a remedial software mapped onto the national curriculum for math (similar to the software products that we discuss under "practice exercises" beneath). After 9 months, the program improved math achievement by 0.17 SDs and computer skills past 0.33 SDs. If a schoolhouse system decides to invest in complimentary laptops, this study suggests that the quality of the software on the laptops is crucial.
To engagement, however, the evidence suggests that children do not learn more than from interacting with laptops than they exercise from textbooks. For example, Bando, Gallego, Gertler, and Romero (2016) compared the effect of free laptop and textbook provision in 271 simple schools in disadvantaged areas of Honduras. After seven months, students in grades iii and 6 who had received the laptops performed on par with those who had received the textbooks in math and language. Further, even if textbooks essentially get obsolete at the end of each school yr, whereas laptops can be reloaded with new materials for each twelvemonth, the costs of laptop provision (not just the hardware, just also the technical assist, Internet, and training associated with information technology) are not yet depression enough to brand them a more toll-effective way of delivering content to learners.
Show on the provision of tablets equipped with software is encouraging but express. For example, de Hoop et al. (2020) evaluated a blended intervention for first grade students in Zambia's Eastern Province that combined infrastructure (electricity via solar power), hardware (projectors and tablets), and educational materials (lesson plans for educators and interactive lessons for learners, both loaded onto the tablets and mapped onto the official Zambian curriculum). Afterward fourteen months, the intervention had improved educatee early on-grade reading by 0.4 SDs, oral vocabulary scores by 0.25 SDs, and early-grade math by 0.22 SDs. It also improved students' achievement by 0.xvi on a locally developed cess. The multifaceted nature of the program, notwithstanding, makes information technology challenging to place the components that are driving the positive furnishings. Pitchford (2015) evaluated an intervention that provided tablets equipped with educational "apps," to be used for 30 minutes per day for two months to develop early math skills among students in grades ane through iii in Lilongwe, Malawi. The evaluation found positive impacts in math achievement, but the main study limitation is that it was conducted in a unmarried school.
Facilitating differentiated instruction
Some other manner in which applied science may improve educational outcomes is past facilitating the delivery of differentiated or individualized instruction. Most developing countries massively expanded access to schooling in recent decades past building new schools and making education more affordable, both by defraying direct costs, likewise as compensating for opportunity costs (Duflo, 2001; World Bank, 2018). These initiatives have not only chop-chop increased the number of learners enrolled in school, but take also increased the variability in learner' preparation for schooling. Consequently, a large number of learners perform well below form-based curricular expectations (see, eastward.g., Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2011; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). These learners are unlikely to go much from "one-size-fits-all" instruction, in which a single educator delivers teaching accounted appropriate for the middle (or meridian) of the achievement distribution (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011). Engineering could potentially assistance these learners past providing them with: (a) educational activity and opportunities for practice that adjust to the level and pace of training of each private (known equally "computer-adaptive learning" (CAL)); or (b) alive, one-on-one tutoring.
Figurer-adaptive learning
1 of the main comparative advantages of engineering science is its ability to diagnose students' initial learning levels and assign students to educational activity and exercises of appropriate difficulty. No individual educator—no matter how talented—can exist expected to provide individualized instruction to all learners in his/her class simultaneously. In this respect, technology is uniquely positioned to complement traditional education. This apply of technology could assistance learners principal basic skills and help them become more than out of schooling.
Although many software products evaluated in recent years have been categorized as CAL, many rely on a relatively coarse level of differentiation at an initial stage (e.g., a diagnostic test) without further differentiation. Nosotros talk over these initiatives under the category of "increasing opportunities for practise" below. CAL initiatives complement an initial diagnostic with dynamic adaptation (i.due east., at each response or prepare of responses from learners) to suit both the initial level of difficulty and rate at which information technology increases or decreases, depending on whether learners' responses are correct or incorrect.
Existing evidence on this specific type of programs is highly promising. Most famously, Banerjee et al. (2007) evaluated CAL software in Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, in which grade iv students were offered two hours of shared reckoner time per week before and after schoolhouse, during which they played games that involved solving math problems. The level of difficulty of such issues adjusted based on students' answers. This program improved math achievement past 0.35 and 0.47 SDs later one and two years of implementation, respectively. Consistent with the promise of personalized learning, the software improved achievement for all students. In fact, one twelvemonth afterward the end of the programme, students assigned to the plan nonetheless performed 0.1 SDs improve than those assigned to a business concern every bit usual condition. More recently, Muralidharan, et al. (2019) evaluated a "blended learning" initiative in which students in grades iv through ix in Delhi, India received 45 minutes of interaction with CAL software for math and language, and 45 minutes of small group pedagogy before or after going to school. After only 4.5 months, the plan improved achievement by 0.37 SDs in math and 0.23 SDs in Hindi. While all learners benefited from the program in absolute terms, the everyman performing learners benefited the most in relative terms, since they were learning very footling in school.
We see two important limitations from this trunk of inquiry. Start, to our cognition, none of these initiatives has been evaluated when implemented during the schoolhouse mean solar day. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish the effect of the adaptive software from that of boosted instructional fourth dimension. 2d, given that most of these programs were facilitated past local instructors, attempts to distinguish the upshot of the software from that of the instructors has been more often than not based on noncausal prove. A frontier challenge in this body of research is to sympathise whether CAL software can increase the effectiveness of school-based instruction by substituting function of the regularly scheduled time for math and language didactics.
Live 1-on-one tutoring
Recent improvements in the speed and quality of videoconferencing, as well equally in the connectivity of remote areas, have enabled yet another mode in which technology can help personalization: live (i.e., real-time) one-on-one tutoring. While the testify on in-person tutoring is deficient in developing countries, existing studies suggest that this approach works best when information technology is used to personalize instruction (run across, e.m., Banerjee et al., 2007; Banerji, Berry, & Shotland, 2015; Cabezas, Cuesta, & Gallego, 2011).
There are almost no studies on the bear on of online tutoring—possibly, due to the lack of hardware and Internet connectivity in low- and middle-income countries. 1 exception is Chemin and Oledan (2020)'s recent evaluation of an online tutoring program for grade 6 students in Kianyaga, Kenya to larn English from volunteers from a Canadian university via Skype ( videoconferencing software) for one hour per week after school. After x months, program beneficiaries performed 0.22 SDs better in a examination of oral comprehension, improved their comfort using technology for learning, and became more willing to engage in cross-cultural advice. Importantly, while the tutoring sessions used the official English textbooks and sought in part to assistance learners with their homework, tutors were trained on several strategies to teach to each learner's individual level of preparation, focusing on basic skills if necessary. To our knowledge, like initiatives within a country take not yet been rigorously evaluated.
Expanding opportunities for practice
A third way in which applied science may improve the quality of teaching is past providing learners with additional opportunities for exercise. In many developing countries, lesson time is primarily devoted to lectures, in which the educator explains the topic and the learners passively copy explanations from the blackboard. This setup leaves little time for in-class practice. Consequently, learners who did not understand the explanation of the fabric during lecture struggle when they have to solve homework assignments on their ain. Technology could potentially address this problem by allowing learners to review topics at their own stride.
Practice exercises
Applied science tin can help learners get more than out of traditional instruction past providing them with opportunities to implement what they learn in class. This approach could, in theory, allow some learners to anchor their agreement of the material through trial and error (i.e., past realizing what they may not take understood correctly during lecture and by getting better acquainted with special cases not covered in-depth in class).
Existing evidence on practice exercises reflects both the promise and the limitations of this use of engineering in developing countries. For example, Lai et al. (2013) evaluated a program in Shaanxi, Mainland china where students in grades three and 5 were required to attend two 40-infinitesimal remedial sessions per week in which they get-go watched videos that reviewed the fabric that had been introduced in their math lessons that calendar week and then played games to practice the skills introduced in the video. Later on four months, the intervention improved math achievement by 0.12 SDs. Many other evaluations of comparable interventions have found similar minor-to-moderate results (run across, e.k., Lai, Luo, Zhang, Huang, & Rozelle, 2015; Lai et al., 2012; Mo et al., 2015; Pitchford, 2015). These effects, however, have been consistently smaller than those of initiatives that arrange the difficulty of the material based on students' operation (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2007; Muralidharan, et al., 2019). We hypothesize that these programs do little for learners who perform several class levels behind curricular expectations, and who would benefit more from a review of foundational concepts from earlier grades.
We see two important limitations from this research. First, most initiatives that have been evaluated thus far combine instructional videos with practice exercises, so it is difficult to know whether their furnishings are driven by the former or the latter. In fact, the program in China described to a higher place allowed learners to ask their peers whenever they did non understand a difficult concept, so it potentially also captured the effect of peer-to-peer collaboration. To our knowledge, no studies accept addressed this gap in the testify.
2nd, virtually of these programs are implemented before or subsequently school, so we cannot distinguish the upshot of additional instructional time from that of the actual opportunity for exercise. The importance of this question was showtime highlighted past Linden (2008), who compared two delivery mechanisms for game-based remedial math software for students in grades 2 and iii in a network of schools run by a nonprofit organization in Gujarat, India: one in which students interacted with the software during the school solar day and some other one in which students interacted with the software before or after school (in both cases, for 3 hours per mean solar day). After a twelvemonth, the first version of the program had negatively impacted students' math achievement by 0.57 SDs and the second i had a goose egg effect. This written report suggested that computer-assisted learning is a poor substitute for regular pedagogy when information technology is of high quality, as was the case in this well-functioning individual network of schools.
In recent years, several studies have sought to remedy this shortcoming. Mo et al. (2014) were among the first to evaluate practice exercises delivered during the school twenty-four hour period. They evaluated an initiative in Shaanxi, China in which students in grades 3 and five were required to interact with the software similar to the one in Lai et al. (2013) for two 40-minute sessions per week. The principal limitation of this study, however, is that the programme was delivered during regularly scheduled computer lessons, so it could not determine the impact of substituting regular math pedagogy. Similarly, Mo et al. (2020) evaluated a self-paced and a teacher-directed version of a similar program for English for grade v students in Qinghai, Cathay. Yet, the central shortcoming of this study is that the teacher-directed version added several components that may likewise influence achievement, such as increased opportunities for teachers to provide students with personalized aid when they struggled with the material. Ma, Fairlie, Loyalka, and Rozelle (2020) compared the effectiveness of additional fourth dimension-delivered remedial education for students in grades iv to 6 in Shaanxi, China through either computer-assisted software or using workbooks. This study indicates whether additional instructional fourth dimension is more than constructive when using technology, but information technology does not address the question of whether school systems may improve the productivity of instructional time during the school twenty-four hour period by substituting educator-led with computer-assisted instruction.
Increasing learner engagement
Another way in which technology may ameliorate education is past increasing learners' engagement with the material. In many school systems, regular "chalk and talk" instruction prioritizes time for educators' exposition over opportunities for learners to ask clarifying questions and/or contribute to class discussions. This, combined with the fact that many developing-country classrooms include a very large number of learners (see, due east.g., Angrist & Lavy, 1999; Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2015), may partially explain why the majority of those students are several grade levels backside curricular expectations (east.g., Muralidharan, et al., 2019; Muralidharan & Zieleniak, 2014; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Engineering science could potentially address these challenges by: (a) using video tutorials for cocky-paced learning and (b) presenting exercises every bit games and/or gamifying exercise.
Video tutorials
Engineering science can potentially increment learner effort and understanding of the textile by finding new and more engaging means to evangelize it. Video tutorials designed for cocky-paced learning—as opposed to videos for whole course instruction, which we hash out under the category of "prerecorded lessons" to a higher place—tin increase learner attempt in multiple ways, including: allowing learners to focus on topics with which they need more help, letting them right errors and misconceptions on their ain, and making the material appealing through visual aids. They can increase agreement by breaking the material into smaller units and tackling common misconceptions.
In spite of the popularity of instructional videos, there is relatively little evidence on their effectiveness. Yet, ii recent evaluations of different versions of the Khan Academy portal, which mainly relies on instructional videos, offer some insight into their impact. Start, Ferman, Finamor, and Lima (2019) evaluated an initiative in 157 public primary and middle schools in five cities in Brazil in which the teachers of students in grades 5 and 9 were taken to the computer lab to larn math from the platform for 50 minutes per week. The authors plant that, while the intervention slightly improved learners' attitudes toward math, these changes did non translate into meliorate performance in this subject area. The authors hypothesized that this could exist due to the reduction of teacher-led math instruction.
More recently, Büchel, Jakob, Kühnhanss, Steffen, and Brunetti (2020) evaluated an after-school, offline commitment of the Khan Academy portal in grades 3 through 6 in 302 principal schools in Morazán, El Salvador. Students in this study received 90 minutes per calendar week of boosted math instruction (effectively nearly doubling full math instruction per calendar week) through teacher-led regular lessons, teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons, or similar lessons assisted by technical supervisors with no content expertise. (Importantly, the outset grouping provided differentiated education, which is not the norm in Salvadorian schools). All three groups outperformed both schools without any additional lessons and classrooms without additional lessons in the aforementioned schools as the program. The teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons performed 0.24 SDs better, the supervisor-led lessons 0.22 SDs better, and the teacher-led regular lessons 0.15 SDs improve, but the authors could not determine whether the effects across versions were different.
Together, these studies suggest that instructional videos work best when provided as a complement to, rather than every bit a substitute for, regular didactics. All the same, the main limitation of these studies is the multifaceted nature of the Khan Academy portal, which also includes other components found to positively improve learner accomplishment, such as differentiated education by students' learning levels. While the software does non provide the type of personalization discussed above, learners are asked to take a placement test and, based on their score, educators assign them different work. Therefore, it is not articulate from these studies whether the furnishings from Khan Academy are driven past its instructional videos or to the software'due south ability to provide differentiated activities when combined with placement tests.
Games and gamification
Engineering can also increase learner appointment by presenting exercises every bit games and/or by encouraging learner to play and compete with others (eastward.thousand., using leaderboards and rewards)—an approach known as "gamification." Both approaches can increment learner motivation and effort by presenting learners with entertaining opportunities for practise and past leveraging peers every bit commitment devices.
There are very few studies on the effects of games and gamification in low- and middle-income countries. Recently, Araya, Arias Ortiz, Bottan, and Cristia (2019) evaluated an initiative in which grade four students in Santiago, Chile were required to participate in two 90-minute sessions per week during the schoolhouse day with instructional math software featuring individual and group competitions (e.yard., tracking each learner's standing in his/her grade and tournaments between sections). Later nine months, the plan led to improvements of 0.27 SDs in the national student assessment in math (information technology had no spillover furnishings on reading). However, it had mixed effects on non-academic outcomes. Specifically, the program increased learners' willingness to employ computers to acquire math, but, at the same time, increased their anxiety toward math and negatively impacted learners' willingness to interact with peers. Finally, given that ane of the weekly sessions replaced regular math instruction and the other one represented additional math instructional time, it is non articulate whether the academic furnishings of the programme are driven by the software or the boosted fourth dimension devoted to learning math.
The prognosis:
How can schoolhouse systems adopt interventions that match their needs?
Hither are v specific and sequential guidelines for decisionmakers to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate pupil learning.
1. Have stock of how your current schools, educators, and learners are engaging with technology.
Acquit out a short in-school survey to understand the electric current practices and potential barriers to adoption of technology (we accept included suggested survey instruments in the Appendices); use this information in your decisionmaking process. For example, we learned from conversations with current and onetime ministers of education from various developing regions that a mutual limitation to technology apply is regulations that hold school leaders accountable for amercement to or losses of devices. Another common barrier is lack of access to electricity and Internet, or even the availability of sufficient outlets for charging devices in classrooms. Understanding basic infrastructure and regulatory limitations to the utilise of educational activity technology is a first necessary step. But addressing these limitations volition not guarantee that introducing or expanding technology utilize will accelerate learning. The next steps are thus necessary.
"In Africa, the biggest limit is connectivity. Fiber is expensive, and we don't take it everywhere. The continent is creating a digital carve up betwixt cities, where there is fiber, and the rural areas.
The [Ghanaian] administration put in schools offline/online technologies with books, assessment tools, and open source materials. In deploying this, we are finding that again, teachers are unfamiliar with it. And existing policies prohibit students to bring their own tablets or jail cell phones. The easiest way to practise information technology would accept been to let everyone bring their own device. Merely policies are against information technology."
H.East. Matthew Prempeh, Minister of Education of Ghana, on the need to sympathise the local context.
2. Consider how the introduction of engineering may affect the interactions among learners, educators, and content.
Our review of the evidence indicates that engineering may accelerate educatee learning when it is used to calibration up admission to quality content, facilitate differentiated instruction, increment opportunities for practise, or when it increases learner engagement. For instance, will adding electronic whiteboards to classrooms facilitate access to more than quality content or differentiated didactics? Or volition these expensive boards be used in the same way as the old chalkboards? Will providing i device (laptop or tablet) to each learner facilitate admission to more and better content, or offer students more opportunities to practise and learn? Solely introducing technology in classrooms without additional changes is unlikely to atomic number 82 to improved learning and may be quite costly. If you cannot clearly identify how the interactions among the 3 key components of the instructional core (educators, learners, and content) may change after the introduction of technology, then it is probably not a proficient idea to brand the investment. See Appendix A for guidance on the types of questions to ask.
three. One time decisionmakers have a articulate idea of how didactics engineering science can help accelerate student learning in a specific context, it is of import to define clear objectives and goals and establish ways to regularly assess progress and make course corrections in a timely manner.
For case, is the education engineering expected to ensure that learners in early grades excel in foundational skills—bones literacy and numeracy—by historic period 10? If so, will the technology provide quality reading and math materials, ample opportunities to do, and engaging materials such every bit videos or games? Will educators exist empowered to use these materials in new ways? And how will progress be measured and adjusted?
4. How this kind of reform is approached can thing immensely for its success.
It is easy to nod to issues of "implementation," merely that needs to be more than rhetorical. Keep in listen that good apply of didactics engineering science requires thinking well-nigh how it volition bear on learners, educators, and parents. After all, giving learners digital devices will make no departure if they become broken, are stolen, or go unused. Classroom technologies only affair if educators feel comfortable putting them to work. Since expert technology is generally about complementing or amplifying what educators and learners already do, information technology is about always a mistake to mandate programs from on high. It is vital that technology be adopted with the input of educators and families and with attention to how it will exist used. If technology goes unused or if educators utilise information technology ineffectually, the results will disappoint—no matter the virtuosity of the applied science. Indeed, unused education technology can be an unnecessary expenditure for cash-strapped instruction systems. This is why surveying context, listening to voices in the field, examining how technology is used, and planning for course correction is essential.
5. It is essential to communicate with a range of stakeholders, including educators, school leaders, parents, and learners.
Applied science tin can feel conflicting in schools, misfile parents and (especially) older educators, or become an alluring distraction. Good communication can help accost all of these risks. Taking care to listen to educators and families can aid ensure that programs are informed by their needs and concerns. At the aforementioned time, deliberately and consistently explaining what applied science is and is not supposed to do, how it can exist about effectively used, and the ways in which it can brand information technology more likely that programs work as intended. For instance, if teachers fear that technology is intended to reduce the demand for educators, they will tend to be hostile; if they believe that it is intended to assist them in their work, they volition be more receptive. Absent-minded effective communication, information technology is easy for programs to "fail" not because of the technology but because of how information technology was used. In short, past experience in rolling out education programs indicates that information technology is as important to accept a stiff intervention pattern equally it is to have a solid plan to socialize it amid stakeholders.
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Source: https://www.brookings.edu/essay/realizing-the-promise-how-can-education-technology-improve-learning-for-all/
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