In the World of NCLB It's All About the Data

This week I cut an advertisement from one of the educational technology magazines I get that featured the tag line: "It's All About the Data". In a fit of institutional subversiveness I tacked it on my bulletin board and added my own tag: "Wrong. It's All About the Students.

It's astounding the amount of energy, effort, and money that is now being poured into the testing, evaluation, and monitoring of student testing--all driven by No Child Left Behind requirements that place the emphasis on test results over learning. Where much of the work in the field of educational software previously went into finding new ways to engage students and improve their learning we now spend our time cracking open their little heads and peering in to see what factoids might have stuck in there.

Luckily there are some efforts being undertaken to see what particular types of technology actually impact learning, rather than simply measuring who has learned and how much. SETDA’s PETI Framework and Suite of Tools Address as reported at THE Journal has been announced as a means to measure the impact of technology on learning. I've only had a chance to glance at this, but it appears that there now may be a standardized method for examining the effectiveness of educational technology in order to justify expenditures--another lovely requirement of NCLB.

via Ray Shroeder.