Giving Compass' Take:

• Studies reveal that education technology is not helping students in the classroom advance academically. Researchers believe that teacher implementation and evaluating tech usefulness are the culprits.  

• What are examples of technology that has proved meaningful for student achievement? Are there opportunities for more teacher development around technology in the classroom?

• Read about the role of technology in education. 

When it comes to learning technologies, educators and administrators often focus on what technology to use instead of how the technology facilitates learning. This leads to serious costs.

U.S. fourth-graders who report using tablets in all or nearly all of their classes are a full year behind in reading ability compared with peers who report never using tablets in their classes. Internationally, students who report greater use of technology in their classrooms score worse on the PISA exam, the major international student assessment, even when accounting for differences in wealth and prior performance. This is all according to a recent report by the Reboot Foundation.

These findings align with prior research that found essentially the same thing three years ago: High levels of technology use in the classroom tend to correlate with lower student performance.

The question in both of these reports is not whether technology can improve learning outcomes; lots of well-designed experimental research establishes that it can. The question, rather, is whether it is improving learning outcomes. And the answer seems to be: Not really.

Every year, administrators and teachers make major decisions about which new technologies, software platforms and assessment systems should be added to their ed tech arsenal. Companies pitch their products to school representatives at huge conferences. But technology often is misused, underused or even completely unused. One recent study found that over a third of all technology purchases made by middle schools simply weren’t used. And only 5 percent of purchases met their purchaser’s usage goals.

These findings have a common cause. Teachers and administrators don’t use learning technologies (or even think about using learning technologies) in the right way.

A lot of conversations focus on what the technology can do or how students could use it, rather than how students typically use the technology or the contexts in which it would be most and least effective.

Read the full article about if education technology is useful by Benjamin Keep at The 74.