Amy Owen is the Senior Director, Digital and Teacher Policy at ExcelinEd.
The answer for both groups, on average, is more than 140 ed tech tools, according to researchers at LearnPlatform. If that number sounds surprising, it gets even more dramatic when aggregated up to the district level. In 2022, school districts accessed an average of 1,417 different ed tech tools per month!
Even though some of those tools are free, such as apps and online content like videos and educational games, many ed tech tools come with costs for districts, schools and taxpayers. Researchers at the University of Virginia’s EdTech Evidence Exchange estimate that education technology expenditures in the U.S. top $25 billion annually!
With so many options to choose from and more coming on the market every day, how can local education leaders know which ed tech tools are most likely to contribute to student success?
A useful resource is available through the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE). Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the USDOE’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES) has provided guidance for schools and districts to help them identify whether educational programs, interventions and materials are effective in helping students succeed, as backed by evidence.
IES established four tiers of evidence. Programs that meet the highest bar, Tier 1, have statistically significant positive effects based on rigorous academic research. Programs that meet Tier 4 reflect an initial step of having a logical rationale for how they are expected to work, with plans to study student results over time.
Delineating four distinct tiers of evidence is admirable, because it provides districts and schools with consistent, transparent data about programs and curricula so they can make informed purchasing decisions. However, the requirements to meet those tiers – such as having multi-year research studies of a program’s efficacy – were not designed with ed tech tools in mind.
We all know how fast technology can change, and ed tech tools are no different. They must evolve rapidly to keep pace with overall advancements in technology. That presents a challenge for gathering data. For example, if researchers tracked an ed tech tool’s results during this past 2022-23 school year, their findings might be obsolete by this coming fall if a new iteration of the tool is released in the meantime.
New guidance from USDOE’s Office of Technology offers a path forward. The guidance balances a need for evidence to guide purchasing decisions with recognition of the speed at which ed tech evolves.
In April 2023, the Office of Technology released a series of one-page overviews on how to apply each tier of evidence to ed tech tools. The one-pagers are part of a new EdTech Evidence Toolkit, a suite of resources that includes additional guidance for district and state leaders with purchasing authority along with blog posts and examples from several states and districts.
Moving forward, school districts—and states that run state-level procurement processes on behalf of districts—can now seek and even require relevant information from education technology vendors about the tier of evidence their products meet. This additional transparency can ensure that the tens of billions of dollars spent on education technology annually in the U.S. are directed to the tools most likely to contribute to students’ success.
