What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Giving Compass' Take:
• Morgan Polikoff and Jennifer Dean unpack the advantages and disadvantages of online supplemental educational materials currently in use.
• How can funders help to increase the use of high-quality online materials?
• Read about ways to improve online education.
Where teachers were once limited to traditional textbooks, informational texts, novels, and materials passed along by others, today the online marketplace is wide open, flush with copious materials that teachers might choose, often at little or no cost. But practically nothing is known about what these supplemental instructional materials actually look like and whether they are any good. Do they truly help educators deliver a high-quality curriculum?
In the current study, University of Southern California associate professor Morgan Polikoff and educational consultant Jennifer Dean led an analysis of supplemental materials for high school English language arts (ELA), an area where teachers are highly likely to supplement their core curriculum materials—sometimes because they do not have a core curriculum at all. Polikoff and Dean partner with four expert reviewers with experience in evaluating ELA curricula and assessments to examine over three hundred of the most downloaded materials across three of the most popular supplemental websites: Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadWriteThink, and Share My Lesson. Their analysis addresses two sets of questions:
- What types of materials are teachers downloading most frequently? What kinds of content do they include?
- How do experts rate the quality of these materials?
What are their strengths and weaknesses, and what is the relationship (if any) between how experts view the quality of the materials and how teachers using them do? Supplemental materials are evaluated on both overall dimensions of curriculum quality (such as rigor and usability), as well as more discrete criteria that loosely reflect the key instructional The study yields nine findings, including two strengths and seven weaknesses.
Strengths
Finding 1: The quality of the texts is good to excellent, and students are often asked to provide textual evidence when analyzing a text.
Finding 2: The materials are generally free from errors and well designed.
Weaknesses
Finding 3: Overall, reviewers rate most of the materials as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” Clarity and instructional guidance are weak. At best, there’s modest evidence that the quality of the material predicts teachers’ use of it.
Finding 4: The materials are weakly to moderately aligned with the standards to which they claim alignment.
Finding 5: The overall quality of writing and speaking and listening tasks is weak.
Finding 6: Assessments included in the materials rank poorly because they sometimes fail to cover key content and rarely provide teachers the supports needed to score student work.
Finding 7: Lesson units do a poor job of building students’ content knowledge, and they are generally not cognitively demanding.
Finding 8: The materials do a very poor job of offering teachers support for teaching diverse learners.
Finding 9: Materials score fairly low on their potential to engage students and do not reflect the cultural diversity of classrooms.
Curriculum materials are essential for instruction, offering a bridge between state academic standards and the enacted curriculum that students experience in the classroom. They affect the content of instruction—e.g., what topics are included and excluded, which are emphasized, and how they are sequenced. Several studies of elementary mathematics suggest that the choice of materials can also directly affect student achievement, while a larger and newer study found no such effects. Owing in part to the evidence of potential effects and to their clear role as a key policy lever for implementing standards, curriculum materials have seen heightened interest in the policy and philanthropic communities.