The Solution For The ‘Other 95 Percent’ To Learn Math

In a striking piece in Education Next, Laurence Holt dives into a series of research studies that show strong results for edtech math products Khan Academy, DreamBox Learning, i-Ready, and IXL—when the programs are used as recommended.

The results across the studies are great—0.26 standard deviations (equivalent to several months of additional learning), 0.20 SD, 0.22 SD, and 0.14 SD, respectively.

The problem? As Holt shows, in each of the studies, roughly 5% of students used each program at the minimum level prescribed. That’s a stunning—and depressing—convergence. To give an idea of what that signifies, just 4.7% of the students in the research study on Khan Academy, for example, use it a minimum of 30 minutes per week. Not a lot of time.

The other 95% of students not properly using the programs see minimal gains at best. Which helps explain why, despite the rapid adoption of digital math programs in the United States, we don’t see the growth in math achievement that you might expect based on the research.

Holt offers some theories as to what’s going on here, but I have a couple myself that could lead to more of the other 95 percent using the programs as prescribed.

EdTech Must Pay Attention to the Learning Model

First, as we wrote as far back as Disrupting Class in 2008, it’s not the presence of technology alone that will move learning. It’s the use of technology to support a novel model of learning that will move the needle. What matters most is the model.

A central reason why technology isn’t a silver bullet in education is that when it’s crammed into the existing classroom model, at its best it can only serve as an additional resource to bolster that model’s existing processes and priorities. That means it can make an operation more efficient or allow it to take on additional tasks, but it can’t reinvent the model in and of itself. It also means that in many cases it will conflict with the organization’s processes and priorities and therefore go largely unused.

That could explain what’s going on here. The tech is just an add-on to the whole-class instruction going on. It’s not core to the model. And it’s not that different from Larry Cuban’s research back in the late-1990s showing that fifth graders reported using computers for programs like “Franklin Learns Math” or “Math Rabbit” just 24 minutes a week.

If these edtech vendors instead spent the time and resources to help the schools and classrooms set up even a basic Station Rotation model of blended learning, they could ensure that students would visit the online-learning station for a defined block of time each day in which students would do the digital math program. Then they’d all but guarantee that students would reach the minimum usage levels.