Tech-Inclusive Education: A World-Class System for Every Child (111)

A Tech-Inclusive Approach to Education

This trade-off is not unique to education, though it is particularly acute in this sphere. In many other areas, technology has shown its ability to resolve this trilemma by reducing the marginal cost of scaling identical-quality services to near zero. This makes its use in education an attractive proposition. The past decade in particular has seen significant debate over education technology (or “edtech”). Participants in this debate tend to argue for one of two approaches to edtech.

One is what we might call “tech-driven”: treating promising technological developments, such as virtual-reality headsets, artificial intelligence-driven personalisation or abundant video content, as neutral “solutions” to problems in education. In this view, technology is seen as a way to replace educators or dramatically reduce their role, and the future of education is primarily or entirely digital. This approach has been likened to putting the cart (technology) before the horse (teaching) and is increasingly out of vogue, as it fails to take into account the complexities of the learning process and the multitude of roles, not all related to teaching, that schools play. At best, this allows for reductions in the cost of large-scale delivery with a significant negative impact on the quality of learning.

The alternative, which has gained much ground recently, might be called “tech-assisted”. The argument here is that technology is at its best when it enhances what teachers already do, supporting tried-and-tested pedagogical methods or saving time. The UK government’s Edtech Strategy is a representative example of this approach. This model minimises disruption to existing classrooms and supports the use of pedagogically sound but time-consuming methods such as peer instruction, comparative judgement or diagnostic questions.

In schools that work well with technology, teachers use online platforms to find safe, vetted, curriculum-aligned content produced by their colleagues and subject experts (within the same school or elsewhere) for their lessons. These can be video lessons that bring world-class experts or senior business leaders into the classroom, polished presentations for whole-class sessions or interactive materials such as maps tagged with relevant information that students can explore by themselves or in small groups. These are the kind of materials that teachers can otherwise spend many hours preparing by themselves every week, redoing work already done by colleagues, while under significant time pressures and with fewer resources to achieve the same high standards.

Once they find the materials they like, teachers can edit content to integrate it into existing lesson plans or implement entire sequenced curricula. Less confident or skilled teachers can benefit from digital platforms that support direct instruction, a pedagogically effective approach that incorporates both learning materials for students and scripted lessons for the teachers to follow. Edtech allows for materials and lesson scripts to be rapidly updated based on evolving curricula and feedback from teachers and learners, ensuring that neither group must ever again work with out-of-date textbooks.

Interactive platforms create new opportunities to test students’ knowledge in an engaging way, to improve recall and, most importantly, to provide accurate and immediate feedback. Students compete with each other on quizzes directly linked to the learning materials and can see how well they are performing in real time. Teachers use insights from the platforms to get an immediate picture of students’ strengths and weaknesses so that, unlike with paper tests, they know exactly why a student got particular questions wrong and are able to build a picture of how their knowledge evolves over time. Edtech platforms can create individualised sets of flashcards for materials that students have struggled with so they can revise them in class or at home, while questions on future quizzes can be automatically adjusted to re-test their knowledge.

Insights from interactive platforms can also inform a more personalised approach to teaching. Teachers bring together students with similar misconceptions – or strengths – for small-group or one-on-one tuition sessions, which can also be delivered through digital platforms for after-school catch-up learning. Digital platforms can help scale “teaching at the right level” programmes, which rely on an initial assessment as well as on ongoing tests to assign students content and activities that are most relevant to their level of knowledge. This approach is particularly important in low-income settings where gaps between children’s understanding and formal curricula can be especially large. Adaptive learning platforms, which help differentiate instruction based on students’ previous performance, are also more effective for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A Spotlight on Instructional and Assessment Software

• Kahoot! is an interactive quiz platform used by 9 million teachers worldwide and half of all US students. In a fast-paced classroom activity, students compete with each other to answer questions displayed on a shared screen. Teachers can add their own questions or select from a comprehensive question bank. A review of 93 studies found positive impacts for learning, class dynamics and students’ attitudes, and a reduction in anxiety.
• Nearpod is an interactive platform for planning lesson activities used by 75 per cent of US school teachers. Teachers can add a sequence of their own learning materials, videos and other presentations from Nearpod’s bank of content, as well as tests and other tasks, which students can follow on their own devices or on a screen at the front of the classroom. Regular use of Nearpod has been shown to strongly correlate with academic performance in some districts.
• Mindspark is an adaptive learning platform for maths, English and science used by 500,000 students, primarily in India. It uses data from a set of games, videos and learning activities to identify the learning level of each student and deliver customised content targeted at that level. A randomised controlled trial in India found that after 4.5 months of use, Mindspark users’ knowledge of maths and Hindi increased more than twice as much as that of students going through small-group tuition.
• Oak National Academy is a content platform that was created by teachers in the UK in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic to share resources for remote learning. At its peak, it was used by more than half of the UK’s teachers. The platform now includes over 40,000 resources mapped to UK curricula and has remained in use since schools reopened. Post-lockdown surveys found that children whose teachers used Oak materials were more likely to perform above expectations, and that the materials on the platform are also being used for continuous professional development of teachers.
• Sparx Maths is a homework and assessment platform used by 1.8 million students across 23 countries. The platform automatically provides students with personalised tests and content, including video tutorials, saving teachers up to 200 hours a year on setting and marking homework. Increased use of the platform was found to be linked to better maths performance regardless of students’ socioeconomic background, with one hour of use per week associated with a 30 per cent increase in a school exam grade.

Many such tools have proven successful in formal schooling environments, with leading institutions in many countries making effective use of them. However, tech-assisted education must, by definition, fit within the constraints of existing approaches and is therefore limited in its ability to resolve the crisis trilemma. Its lack of economies of scale means that the benefits of edtech are currently limited to a small subset of schools around the world: spending on education technology is estimated at less than 5 per cent of global education expenditure. Of that total, educational institutions, as opposed to parents or students, account for less than half – and less than a tenth of their digital budgets is spent on instructional or assessment software (see previous examples), even taking into account the surge in demand driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. Education’s lack of digitalisation relative to other sectors means it is missing out on the opportunities that at-scale adoption of technologies creates to resolve the education-crisis trilemma.

More importantly, the pandemic has shown the limits of both approaches. We saw the failure of technology when running up against the constraints of connectivity and device access, lack of physical space for learning and the need to develop digital skills – meaning quality learning was only available to a select few. We also saw that moving traditional ways of teaching online without adapting them to this new digital context resulted in subpar learning experiences.

Learning the lessons of Covid-19 should give us a post-digital perspective on education. We need a more adaptable approach to education systems, where decisions about their design are shaped by the social and material contexts in which learning happens, and the purposes to which it is directed. These decisions should include (though not be limited to) ideas about the most effective and efficient use of technology – that is, education systems should become “tech-inclusive”. Differences in context would mean that the specifics of such decisions would vary across and even within systems. The goal of education policy should be to create an environment that minimises the barriers to those decisions being made freely – and then remade as needs and circumstances evolve.

To give every child access to a world-class education system, we must move on from the debate between “tech-driven” or “tech-assisted” approaches and become “tech-inclusive”, with a focus on conditions within the system as a whole. This, in turn, requires paying equal attention to the different dimensions of good schools (administration, infrastructure, the experience of teachers and learners, and parental engagement) and understanding what good looks like across each of them in any given context. Only then will we be able to fully address the global education crisis.

*To be continued

Tech-Inclusive Education: A World-Class System for Every Child (11)

Introduction

Access to education is a universal human right. Expanding access to education is also a universal good. Education transforms lives and lifts up nations. As knowledge is the backbone of economic growth, giving everyone the knowledge they require and the skills they need to make sense of the world should not be up for debate. A world-class education should be the birthright of every child.

The economic case for investment in education is as strong as the moral one. UNESCO analysis shows that an individual’s earnings increase by 8 per cent for every year spent at primary school and 13 per cent for each year of secondary school. At country level, when average educational attainment rises by a year, annual per capita GDP growth increases from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent. Ensuring all young people in low-income countries (LICs) are literate would lift 171 million people out of poverty.

Yet today, for far too many children, a good education is out of reach. Around the world, systems struggle to deliver high-quality education at significant scale and sustainable cost. There is unprecedented and unmet demand for education, with more than 270 million new secondary-school places a year needed by 2030. Funding of education is insufficient and inefficient, with just 0.5 per cent of global education spend directed to low-income countries where the need is the highest, while high-income countries face rapidly diminishing returns. There is staggering inequity of educational outcomes both between and within countries, with more than 260 million children in the Global South leaving primary school unable to read, and one in five 15-year-olds in OECD countries lacking minimum proficiency in reading, maths or science. Education systems today do not have the capacity to change at the pace required to meet the needs and aspirations of learners and best support economic growth.

Technology holds the promise of overcoming these fundamental challenges – a promise that so far remains unfulfilled.

The Enduring Importance of Schools

The global expansion of access to education is one of the great success stories of the last century. A hundred years ago, only a third of the world’s population was literate. Today, 86 per cent are. Central to that expansion was the creation of functioning schools. Forged in the Industrial Revolution, the practice of compulsory schooling became a quintessential institution of 20th-century government, delivering a standardised minimum level of education at significant scale and creating robust, predictable and enduring routes to learning.

Schools also play an important broader role in our society, as the disruption caused by Covid-19 has proved. In addition to aiding the cognitive development of children, schools have a supervisory function, providing a safe environment for children during the day and freeing up parents to go to work. They provide effective structures for socialisation, helping children to develop and internalise societal values, identities, expectations around behaviour, and attitudes to citizenship and civic life. Finally, they validate knowledge and skills to support students’ participation in further education or the labour market. It is the combined impact of these roles that makes education such a powerful force for individuals, societies and economies.

But the education crisis is real and urgent. The design of school systems today, like other offshoots of industrial-era government, is fundamentally mismatched to the challenges and rapid pace of change driven by the 21st-century technology revolution. Schools prioritise consistency over responsiveness and suffer rapidly diminishing returns to scale that make access to high-quality education a matter of luck. Admitting that this is the case is not the same as saying that schools are modelled on factories or that education hasn’t changed in a hundred years, as a popular – and self-evidently false – cliché would have it. As we consider what needs to be done to fulfil the promise of universal education in the 21st century, we must consider what aspects of education systems work well and why they have not become the norm everywhere.

The Education-Crisis Trilemma

The answer to this last question can be expressed in terms of a trilemma. Unlocking the benefits of world-class education for every child in the world requires grappling with three policy goals:

• Delivering a high-quality education that meets the learning needs of children in a safe environment free from harassment and discrimination.
• Meeting the logistical and systems-design challenges of providing equal access to education for all children.
• Funding the education system at a public cost that is sustainable in the long-term.

Figure 1 – The education-crisis trilemma

Source: TBI

The fundamental reason for the education crisis is that these three policy goals are in tension with each other and the current design of school systems is not equal to resolving these tensions. At best, they accomplish two out of three. For example, many low- and lower-middle-income countries have been able to massively scale up their primary education systems in the past two decades at relatively low cost. Yet, as the World Bank has noted, being in school is not the same as learning and the quality of education in these systems is often inadequate. On the other hand, there are some standout examples of high-quality education all around the world, but the fundamental logistical constraints imposed by the design of today’s systems mean their cost is only sustainable at the scale of a single school, school chain or perhaps, in a few cases, of a small country.

Few debates highlight this trilemma better than the vexed issue of class sizes. Research has consistently shown that one-on-one or small-group tuition produces better learning outcomes, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Reducing class sizes has therefore come to be an emotive policy issue, seen as a simple path to improving quality: hire and retain more teachers, achieve smaller classes and better outcomes. In practice, for reductions in class sizes to have an impact, they need to be significant (limiting numbers to fewer than 20 pupils in a class, and ideally closer to 12 to 15), meaning you would need to increase teaching-staff numbers in the developed world by 30 to 50 per cent (and by far more in the Global South).

Staff salaries are already the largest budget item in education, making class-size reduction prohibitively expensive at current salary levels. In the US, for example, decreasing the average student-to-teacher ratio by one would cost $12 billion a year. Reducing that outlay would make it difficult to attract qualified teachers, cancelling out any gains in quality while still incurring large costs. This is one reason why small class sizes have also become one of the selling points of private education, where resources are less constrained and student numbers are small, illustrating with painful clarity the trilemma of quality, scale and cost. It is also one of the reasons why the OECD found no direct link between class size and student performance. It has been shown that systems with relatively large class sizes, for example in Singapore or some cities in China, can perform well.

*To be continued

Tech-Inclusive Education: A World-Class System for Every Child (1)

By multiple authors

Foreword

Today, more than ever, education must be the top priority for governments. The global technological revolution is driving rapid and irreversible changes in every area of our lives: new types of knowledge, new forms of communication, new workplace skills. Harnessing these changes, making the revolution work for everyone, is the key to economic prosperity and the central challenge for progressive politics.

With all the possibilities tech can provide, we should settle for nothing less than a world-class education for every child. Instead, education is stuck in a world of excellence for the few, not the many. The differences in outcomes both between and within countries are staggering. Like many public services, education is at a crisis point where incremental change is no longer enough.

Covid-19 disrupted the learning of more than a billion children as the resilience of education systems was put to the test. But the pandemic also showed us a way forward. All manner of technology was deployed to keep children learning. Teachers adapted rapidly and under the most difficult of circumstances to new ways of working and new ways of teaching. We saw that technology in education, far from a gimmick or a threat, is a source of resilience.

We will need every ounce of this resilience in the face of what is to come for the education sector. Analysis for this report shows the need to create places for more than 270 million more school pupils a year by 2030 – the largest expansion of school education in history. The scale of the challenge demands an immediate step change in how we think about the role of technology in education.

Brilliant examples of technology used to deliver a quality education abound. They include providing the best resources for teachers to use in classroom teaching and home learning; accurate and timely feedback to students; and engaging, collaborative learning experiences adapted to learners’ ability. But everywhere these examples are limited to pockets of good practice.

To make technology work in education, the right conditions are needed right across the board: empowered school leaders, fit-for-purpose infrastructure, better teacher recruitment and training, parental participation and above all good content, effective assessments and relevant skills for learners. Getting this baseline right is hard but crucial for technology to become more than a useful bolt-on. Systems’ starting points on this journey will differ, which is why this report proposes a new way of thinking about reform: the “minimum viable education system” framework.

With such systems in place, we can give learners control of their data and put it to use in myriad new ways, driving school improvement, closing skills gaps and helping candidates find the best jobs. The best experts in the world can enter every classroom and let teachers do what they do best, giving all children more of their teachers’ attention. We can bring new energy to the teaching profession with clear career prospects, greater autonomy and better pay. We can break the boundaries of geography with a World Education Service, free at the point of delivery, and a remote-learning infrastructure that creates true school choice without compromising children’s wellbeing or parents’ ability to go to work.

My time in government was driven by the ambition of making Britain a learning society, ready to face the challenges of the technology revolution. Today, the world itself must become a learning society. Building tech-inclusive education systems is a key step towards this.

Tony Blair
Executive Chairman

Executive Summary

The global education crisis is real, persistent and urgent. The inequity of educational outcomes is staggering: 260 million children – a third of pupils in primary school today – will reach the last grade without learning to read; the same number are out of school entirely; in OECD countries, one in five 15-year-olds lack minimum proficiency in reading, maths or science.

We need to find cost-effective ways of delivering education of a consistently high standard to hundreds of millions of students – and the scale of the challenge, already exacerbated by Covid-19, will only grow in the next decade as the world moves towards achieving UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 to realise inclusive and equitable quality education for all. The solution lies in developing a radically better approach to evaluating and applying new technologies in education (edtech).

The two schools of thought currently dominant in edtech are not fit for purpose: the “tech-driven” approach, in which technology replaces or dramatically reduces the role of educators, ignores the complexities of education practices; the “tech-assisted” approach, where technology is adapted to enhance existing teaching methods, has frequently proved useful but is subject to the same logistical constraints as the rest of today’s education systems.

We propose a tech-inclusive education system in which decisions about how to use technology are made alongside and in alignment to other pedagogical choices, informed by a good understanding of their purpose and context. The goal of education policy should be to create an environment where those decisions about using tech can be freely made, and then remade as needs and circumstances evolve.

Technology offers the opportunity to deliver a better learning experience to the millions of children currently without access to the fundamentals of education: literacy and numeracy. The international community should establish a World Education Service, hosted by UNESCO or UNICEF and freely available to anyone in the world, that provides remote-learning opportunities through a range of internet and low-tech channels, and operates in close partnership with local and international edtech companies.

Unlocking the benefits of world-class education for every child requires grappling with three policy goals:

• Designing and delivering high-quality education that meets the learning needs of children and supports future economic growth.
• Meeting the logistical and systems-design challenges of providing equal access to education for all children.
• Funding the education system at a public cost that is sustainable in the long term.

The education crisis persists because these three goals are in tension with each other and the current design of school systems is not equal to resolving these tensions. To solve this trilemma, equal attention must be paid to the several key dimensions of successful education – including infrastructure, teachers, and support for parents and carers – and instead of prioritising investment in one aspect of the system at the expense of others, governments should aim to reach the baseline level across each dimension first. Our “minimum viable education system” framework lays out what a minimum acceptable level of quality looks like across each dimension in any given context.

The minimum viable education system would allow tech-inclusive approaches to education to be piloted and scaled at a national level. This would open possibilities for far-reaching reforms over the next decade that make the most of the potential of technology. In line with the framework, we recommend that policymakers should:

• Introduce a lifelong digital learner ID, issued at the start of compulsory education, that gives students control over their data, improves accountability for schools and edtech providers, and builds a comprehensive picture of a child’s learning.
• Reorganise classrooms into cohorts and transform teaching career paths, providing students with access to varied learning activities and in-person support, and allowing trainee teachers to draw on the subject knowledge of more experienced colleagues as they work in teams to deliver a mix of small-group tuition and high-quality digital learning for larger groups.
• Break the link between geography and educational opportunities and expand choice for pupils and parents by putting in place infrastructure and regulation for “in-person remote” schooling. Remote learning hubs can complement remote school places by providing supervision from trained and vetted staff, peer socialisation and a suitable working environment.

*To be continued

When Teachers and School Counselors Become Informal Mentors, Students Thrive

By Madeline Will

For years, the research has been clear: Teacher-student relationships matter. And now, a new working paper shines more light on just how important these relationships can be for students’ academic success.

Some students form deep connections with their teachers, counselors, or athletic coaches, who are often the adults they see most often aside from family. And those bonds may organically develop into an informal mentorship, in which educators support students both academically and socially. These types of relationships, experts say, will be particularly important this fall as students return to school still grappling with trauma from the pandemic.

Indeed, according to a national longitudinal study, more than 15 percent of adolescents identified a teacher, counselor, or coach as the adult who, other than their parents or stepparents, had made the most important positive difference in their lives. About 90 percent of the reported school-based mentors were counselors or teachers, and students were most likely to have met them toward the end of 9th grade or the beginning of 10th grade.

These relationships last for many years in the vast majority of cases, and in many cases, well after students graduate from high school,” said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and the lead author of the working paper. “We know these are not just interactions that are part of teacher-student relationships inside the classroom or on the sports field or in the counseling office. … School-based natural mentors go above and beyond and step outside their formal role.”

Yet the students who research shows would benefit the most from mentoring—namely students from low-income families—are less likely to have access to those types of relationships.

Kraft, Alexander Bolves of Brown University, and Noelle Hurd of the University of Virginia analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which followed a nationally representative sample of middle and high schoolers for three decades, starting in the 1994-95 school year. While their analysis is not proof positive of a causal effect, Kraft called this “the most robust empirical evidence to date” on the relationship between school-based natural mentors and students’ long-term success. 

The respondents commonly said their school-based mentors gave them advice and guidance, encouraged them to stay out of trouble, and helped them grow up. These are often long-lasting, close relationships—80 percent of young people said their mentor remained actively important in their lives after they graduated from high school. The educators helped shape students’ identities, notions of self-worth, and moral values, respondents said.

Mentoring is “individualized and different for every kid,” Kraft said, but school-based mentors often help students with their homework, offer advice, and support them as they apply to college and navigate the financial aid system.

And it works: The study found that when students have a school-based mentor, they are more likely to pass their classes, earn more credits, and earn a higher GPA. And in the long run, they are 15 percentage points more likely than students without mentors to attend college and complete almost an entire year of higher education.

Students don’t have equal access to natural mentors at school

The study found that Black and Latinx students, as well as students from low-income families, were less likely to report having a school-based mentor. White and Asian students—particularly Asian male students—from more-affluent families were the most likely to report being mentored by an educator.

Kraft said it’s not surprising that fewer students of color have a school-based mentor because past research finds that mentors and mentees often share similar backgrounds. The teacher workforce is comprised mostly of white women from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

Past research also finds that adults are more likely to mentor adolescents whom they see as being academically gifted, physically attractive, outgoing, and easy to get along with. Yet teachers often have implicit racial biases, and studies have shown that many perceive Black students as angry when they’re not. 

Hiring more teachers of color, Kraft said, could help improve students’ access to school-based mentors.

“I think there’s a real paradox in the promise that mentoring holds,” he said. “These are more likely to be relationships that white students and students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds develop. However, we also find evidence that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds appear to benefit most from natural mentoring.”

Source: Education Week