What Data Will Show That Edtech ‘Works’?

November 7, 2016

Proving Ground Director Bi Vuong speaks about how school districts and charter management organizations can utilize their data to measure how effective different educational software programs are at producing desired outcomes. 

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“The challenge with regard to evaluating the product efficacy across a variety of educational software programs is the variation in the way data are collected by the educational software provider,” says Bi Vuong, director of Proving Ground, an initiative at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. Her team is currently working with three school districts and 10 charter management organizations to study the impact and implementation of edtech programs including Achieve 3000 and ST Math.

“Knowing these two categories of information—implementation and impact—is foundational,” Vuong adds, to drawing insights into whether a tool has made an impact on student outcomes. In other words, matching product usage data with user outcomes data is a starting point to understanding how well an intervention may be working.

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