Perspectives: As Technology Use Explodes in Classrooms, Philanthropy Must Help Ensure All Students Benefit

This article originally ran in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, authored by John Overdeck, President of Overdeck Family Foundation and co-founder and co-chair of Two Sigma Investments, LP.

It’s impossible to be a parent without seeing firsthand the powerful role that technology plays in kids’ daily lives. But today’s tweens and teens aren’t just scrolling through TikTok and posting on Snapchat in their free time. Increasingly, they’re also spending large chunks of classroom time on screens.

Since 2020, the amount of technology used in classrooms has exploded. Experts estimate that the pandemic increased spending on education technology to more than $50 billion. School districts access an average of 1,449 different education-technology products each month. And the technology tools and practices used during the pandemic, such as Zoom and Google Meet, are now standard fixtures in many schools.

The downsides of this trend are well documented. During the pandemic, the lack of in-person time with teachers and peers and the reliance on technology-based instruction had detrimental effects on learning and children’s mental health. Especially for the youngest kids, virtual learning is no replacement for physical attendance in a quality early-learning environment.

More recently, the launch of ChatGPT and other artificial-intelligence tools that can perform tasks such as writing essays and lesson plans offer yet another avenue for technology to influence education in new, and potentially problematic, ways.

While technology should never be the primary mode of education, its potential to improve learning on a large scale cannot be ignored. The question is, what helps students — and what doesn’t?

In the past few years, several studies funded by philanthropy, including by the Overdeck Family Foundation, which I oversee, have begun to reveal possible answers. Specifically, early data is pointing the way to a future where technology plays a significant role in improving engagement with families, tracking student progress, and providing personalized learning solutions.

To have a real impact though, these tools need to be continually refined and made available at scale. Grant makers who want to ensure that tech-enabled education approaches help all students succeed should consider investing in ongoing evidence-building research and innovations in the following areas.

Family engagement. For decades, researchers have observed that children are far more likely to perform well when parents and caregivers are involved in their learning. But connecting with every family is both difficult and expensive. New tech tools, however, allow teachers to reach families who historically faced higher barriers to school engagement.

The nonprofit TalkingPoints, for example, provides a two-way, multilingual, family-engagement platform that uses text messages to facilitate communication between teachers and families. The organization’s internal research found that 98 percent of teachers who used the platform were able to connect with families they had never reached before. And a recent foundation-backed evaluation found that schools that adopted TalkingPoints experienced a 15 percent reduction in absentee rates compared with schools that did not, including a 22 percent reduction among Black students and a 25 percent drop among students with disabilities.

More research and philanthropic support are needed to understand the role that technology can play in improving and expanding a school’s family-engagement practices, including making the connection between such practices and issues such as academic performance and attendance. Philanthropy can also make it easier for school districts and states to invest in effective family-engagement solutions by funding ongoing research and development and guidelines for best practices, as well as by convening school and state leaders to share the lessons they’ve learned.

Student assessment. Technology can help teachers better understand student performance through what’s known as formative assessments, which track student progress more frequently and informally than end-of-year testing. These assessments allow teachers to respond to student needs in a timely and effective manner.

Nonprofits such as Quill.org and CenterPoint Education Solutions offer programs that provide real-time insight into student progress through diagnostic assessments, ungraded quizzes, and worksheets. When used alongside quality curricula with clearly stated learning objectives, they can save teachers time by providing up-to-date information about a student’s skills and areas of challenge.

Philanthropy can advance this work by supporting the next generation of formative assessments, including technology that can not only spot students’ mistakes, but also diagnose the underlying factors that contributed to those errors. Such assessments would then provide real-time personalized feedback for students, educators, and families on the steps needed to master a given concept.

Philanthropic investment in such innovations could also help attract technology talent to education-focused nonprofits, which traditionally struggle to compete with for-profit organizations.

Personalized learning. The benefits of tutoring and personalized learning customized to each student’s strengths and needs are no longer reserved for the few school districts or families that can afford them. Technology platforms that incorporate a personalized approach, such as Zearn, Khan Academy, and ST Math, offer a cost-effective alternative. Early evaluations of all three of these platforms suggest the potential for significant student growth in classes where they are used regularly.

The vast reach of such platforms means that insights gleaned from ongoing research and development can be rapidly incorporated into technology to benefit large numbers of students.

For example, last summer, the nonprofit math learning platform Zearn published a study that examined how 600,000 elementary and middle-school students responded to education approaches that focused on boosting student skills when they needed help rather than offering them remedial support. It found that students who received individualized grade-level support completed twice as many lessons and struggled less than when they had remedial instruction.

Technology also opens up tutoring options to many more students. New interim data from a randomized controlled trial of a lower-cost version of Saga Education’s tutoring programs found that combining in-person tutoring with an education-technology component was about as effective as a more expensive fully in-person model. In the ongoing study, students experienced significant growth in math achievement during one school year — the equivalent of approximately three-quarters of a school year of additional learning.

Research of this kind clearly shows the benefits of technological innovations for students when thoughtfully incorporated into classrooms. But not all educational technology is created equal. At a time of unprecedented learning loss, the most important role philanthropy can play is in ensuring that evidence follows innovation and precedes large-scale availability of technology products in classrooms. Doing so is the best way to make sure technology meets its intended goals and improves learning for all students.

Header image courtesy of Khan Academy