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At a time when more than 11,000 edtech tools are on the market and schools are embracing learning technology like never before, there is a stunning lack of research and evidence to support the efficacy of those products.
A report released this spring from LearnPlatform, a company that helps districts better understand and manage the technology they’re using, found that of the 100 most accessed edtech products in K-12 classrooms in the first half of the 2022-23 school year, just 26 have published research aligned to one of the four tiers of evidence in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Of those 26 edtech solutions with ESSA-aligned research available, 17 had earned the entry-level ESSA tier, Level IV, which asks only that a product “demonstrates a rationale.” Four of the companies had earned ESSA Level III (“promising evidence”), none had earned ESSA Level II (“moderate evidence”), and five had earned the highest tier, ESSA Level I (“strong evidence”).
That doesn’t mean the other products don’t work the way they’re designed to work. It means there is no way of knowing — yet — whether, when, for whom and under what conditions those products work as intended. And that leaves districts to do a great deal of guesswork.
At a time when students are trying to make up for instructional time lost during the pandemic and many school districts have seen two decades of progress wiped out in reading and math, the last thing that should be happening in education is trial and error.
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