#  How Do We Know If Ed Tech Even Works? 

 





June 05, 2018

 

 

 *CEPR Faculty Director Thomas Kane co-authored the following Education Week op-ed, explaining the importance of rigorously evaluating ed tech before scaling up.*

 In April, the newest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores once again showed minimal progress in U.S. math and reading achievement and a widening achievement gap between our highest and lowest performers. Against this backdrop, educators today are eager for solutions that have long seemed elusive to age-old challenges in education.

 Education technology will be part of the solution. Technology today allows teachers to adapt instruction to wide-ranging student needs. Students can use software to receive rapid, specific feedback and work through richer, more realistic problems. Education technology is now ubiquitous in many U.S. classrooms—with annual pre-K-12 spending on software reaching a staggering $8.3 billion, according to a 2015 estimate from the Software and Information Industry Association.

 Yet we cannot be blind to the risks. Cash-strapped schools may be tempted to purchase software to keep their most troublesome students occupied, rather than to actually teach them. Today, a majority of products are purchased with no evidence of efficacy. Based on a survey of more than 500 school and district leaders conducted by a 2016 EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium working group, only 11 percent of those responsible for making education-technology adoption decisions demand peer-reviewed research.

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 [Continue reading at Education Week.](https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/06/06/how-do-we-know-if-ed-tech.html)



 

 

 



 

 

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