US Dept of Ed 4 Year Test of Digital Curriculum

Eb60812USDOESoftwareProductTesting

This week’s edition of Education Week (August 9, 2006) had a front page story. “Reporting of Software Product-Testing Stirs Debate.”

In 2003 the US Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES) commissioned a $10 million study of fifteen eLearning products in 132 schools. The digital curriculum types differed, including the level of hybridization with textbooks and activities. The intent was use the “gold standard” of random assignment to test the educational effectiveness. There were 9,000 students and 439 teachers in the control and experimental groups. The enterprises providing the products for testing in the 2004-05 school year were:

Grade 1 – Early Reading:

Autoskill International, Riverdeep, Waterford Institute, Headsprout, and PLATO Learning;

Grade 4 – Reading Comprehension

Autoskill International, Scholastic, Pearson Digital Learning, Leapfrog Schoolhouse;

Grade 8 – PreAlgebra

Computaught, PLATO Learning, Meridian Creative Group;

Grade 9 – Algebra

Carnegie Learning. PLATO Learning, Meridian Creative Group.

The project will continue in a second phase for 2005-2006.

A year after the first phase the IES is about to release the first report (end of summer.) It will release only the aggregated findings for the four categories. The enterprises will receive the results on their products. For the time being the methodology of the national-level, randomized-trial evaluations and the individual product results will be kept under wraps.

Too bad! Arizona needs both to not only as experimental design methodology for our Middle School Math pilot RFP but to help locate and attract potential bidders. This theoretical approach is fine for high level theories on the current state of digital curriculum, but schools need tools now to. The admonition of “eat your vegetables” does little for market basket selections.

The past 20 years of research and Meta studies on K-12 eLearning shows that even primitive computer aided instruction and Internet with productivity applications will consistency produce an effect factor of .3 to .4 more learning for given time. We know eLearning works and is highly cost effective. Now we need “Consumer Reports” type of buying data (Ted the Ed.)

The intent was to have enterprises volunteer for a competitive selection process. There was a huge turn out in 2003 of 163 products with 17 selected (two were subsequently dropped). The companies can release their individual data from Phase 1.

The Phase 2 data will be broken out product by product for consumer comparison.

This pioneering effort by the U.S. Department of Education has broken new ground. Building on their data and process, the Digital Curriculum Institute design and implementation will be more comprehensive and collaboration with the eLearning digital curriculum Industry is expected to be strong.