If schools are focused on measuring their success solely by overall student achievement, students who bring down the average are more likely to be forced out. A more compassionate and understanding school environment is likely to reduce the need for security guards, police officers, and zero-tolerance policies—all of which contribute to a hostile and regimented environment. Studies have found—not at all surprisingly—that underqualified teachers are tied to poor outcomes for students.
The good news is that this is one of the most straightforward areas where policy makers can have an impact. They must clarify standards for teachers seeking licenses and raise standards in areas where student outcomes are lowest. With these changes, individual states need to raise the bar for teacher certifications to ensure that educators are truly prepared for their jobs. In recent decades, the education system has moved away from teachers and local boards in terms of who makes decisions that affect classrooms and curricula.
Consequently, student outcomes have suffered. Policy makers who are aware of this pattern can push for a move away from standardized control and toward community-based mechanisms, such as community-elected school boards, that have the power and authority to make decisions about how their students are educated.
With these initial steps in mind, lawmakers and their constituents can start to move together in the direction of change. Education System Is Failing. Studies indicate that extensive use of such instructors may contribute to higher dropout rates and to grade inflation. States have made substantial cuts in support per student over the past 30 years for public colleges and community colleges.
Research suggests that failing to increase appropriations to keep pace with enrollment growth tends to reduce learning and even lower graduation rates. Some Immediate Improvements Many colleges provide a formidable array of courses, majors and extracurricular opportunities, but firsthand accounts indicate that many undergraduates do not feel that the material conveyed in their readings and lectures has much relevance to their lives.
More Substantial Reforms More fundamental changes will take longer to achieve but could eventually yield even greater gains in the quality of undergraduate education. They include: Improving graduate education.
The Need for Research Finally, there is an urgent need for more and better research both to improve the quality of undergraduate education and to increase the number of students who complete their studies. How can remedial education be improved? At present, low rates of completion in remedial courses are a major impediment to raising levels of educational attainment. The use of computer-aided instruction in remedial math provides one promising example of the type of improvement that could yield substantial benefits, and there are doubtless other possibilities.
Far too little is known about the kinds of courses or other undergraduate experiences that contribute to such noneconomic benefits in later life as better health, greater civic participation and lower incidence of substance abuse and other forms of self-destructive behavior.
Better understanding of those connections could help educators increase the lasting value of a college education while providing a stronger empirical basis for the sweeping claims frequently made about the lifelong benefits of a liberal education. Such understanding would also reduce the risk of inadvertently eliminating valuable aspects of a college education in the rush to find quicker, cheaper ways of preparing students to obtain good jobs of immediate value to economic growth.
Existing research suggests that better advising and other forms of student support may substantially enhance the effect of increased financial aid in boosting the numbers of students who complete their studies. With billions of dollars already being spent on student grants and loans, it would clearly be helpful to know more about how to maximize the effects of such subsidies on graduation rates.
More work is needed to develop better ways for colleges to measure student learning, not only for critical thinking and writing but also for other purposes of undergraduate education.
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Online curricula now include lesson plans, simulations, and demonstrations for classroom use and review. With online connections, students can share their work and communicate more productively and creatively. Teachers can maintain records and assessments using software tools and stay in close touch with students and families via email and voicemail.
Schools can reduce administrative costs by using technology tools, as other fields have done, and provide more funds for the classroom. Instead, they plan, research, and implement their experiments using material gathered online from reliable chemistry resources. Reorganize : Resources Resources of time, money, and facilities must be restructured.
The school day should allow for more in-depth project work beyond the minute period, including block scheduling of classes two hours or longer.
Schools should not close for a three-month summer vacation, but should remain open for student activities, teacher development, and community use. Through the practice of looping, elementary school teachers stay with a class for two or more years, deepening their relationships with students.
More money in school districts should be directed to the classroom rather than the bureaucracy. New school construction and renovation should emphasize school design that supports students and teachers collaborating in teams, with pervasive access to technology.
Schools can be redesigned to also serve as community centers that provide health and social services for families, as well as counseling and parenting classes. Intersession workshops allow its K-5 students time for hands-on arts, science, and computer projects or sports in addition to language arts and math enrichment.
Involve : Parents When schoolwork involves parents, students learn more. Parents and other caregivers are a child's first teachers and can instill values that encourage school learning. For example, Naslund-Hadley, Parker, and Hernandez-Agramonte evaluated a preschool math program in Cordillera, Paraguay that used audio segments and written materials four days per week for an hour per day during the school day. After five months, the intervention improved math scores by 0.
Yet, the integration of prerecorded material into regular instruction has not always been successful. For example, de Barros evaluated an intervention that combined instructional videos for math and science with infrastructure upgrades e. After 11 months, the intervention negatively impacted math achievement by 0. It reduced the share of lesson time that educators devoted to instruction and negatively impacted an index of instructional quality.
Chiplunkar, Dhar, and Nagesh evaluated an initiative in Chennai the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu, India delivered by the same organization as above that combined short videos that explained key concepts in math and science with worksheets, facilitator-led instruction, small groups for peer-to-peer learning, and occasional career counseling and guidance for grade 9 students.
These lessons took place after school for one hour, five times a week. Drawing general lessons from this body of research is challenging for at least two reasons. First, all of the studies above have evaluated the impact of prerecorded lessons combined with several other components e.
Second, while these studies evaluate some type of prerecorded lessons, none examines the content of such lessons. Thus, it seems entirely plausible that the direction and magnitude of the effects depends largely on the quality of the recordings e. These studies also raise three important questions worth exploring in future research. One of them is why none of the interventions discussed above had effects on high-stakes exams, even if their materials are typically mapped onto the official curriculum.
Another question is whether these interventions have long-term effects on teaching practices. It seems plausible that, if these interventions are deployed in contexts with low teaching quality, educators may learn something from watching the videos or listening to the recordings with learners. Yet another question is whether these interventions make it easier for schools to deliver instruction to learners whose native language is other than the official medium of instruction. Technology can also allow learners living in remote areas to access education.
The evidence on these initiatives is encouraging. For example, Johnston and Ksoll evaluated a program that broadcasted live instruction via satellite to rural primary school students in the Volta and Greater Accra regions of Ghana. For this purpose, the program also equipped classrooms with the technology needed to connect to a studio in Accra, including solar panels, a satellite modem, a projector, a webcam, microphones, and a computer with interactive software.
After two years, the intervention improved the numeracy scores of students in grades 2 through 4, and some foundational literacy tasks, but it had no effect on attendance or classroom time devoted to instruction, as captured by school visits. The authors interpreted these results as suggesting that the gains in achievement may be due to improving the quality of instruction that children received as opposed to increased instructional time. Naik, Chitre, Bhalla, and Rajan evaluated a similar program in the Indian state of Karnataka and also found positive effects on learning outcomes, but it is not clear whether those effects are due to the program or due to differences in the groups of students they compared to estimate the impact of the initiative.
In one context Mexico , this type of distance education had positive long-term effects. Navarro-Sola took advantage of the staggered rollout of the telesecundarias i.
It also had a long-term influence on the educational and employment trajectory of its graduates. Each additional year of education induced by the policy increased average income by nearly 18 percent. This effect was attributable to more graduates entering the labor force and shifting from agriculture and the informal sector.
Similarly, Fabregas leveraged a later expansion of this policy in and found that each additional telesecundaria per 1, adolescents led to an average increase of 0.
It is crucial to interpret these results keeping in mind the settings where the interventions were implemented. School systems interested in taking up similar interventions should assess the extent to which their learners or parts of their learner population find themselves in similar conditions to the subjects of the studies above. This illustrates the importance of assessing the needs of a system before reviewing the evidence.
Technology also seems well positioned to disseminate educational materials. Specifically, hardware e. In theory, these materials could not only undergo a quality assurance review e. In practice, however, most initiatives that have provided learners with free computers, laptops, and netbooks do not leverage any of the opportunities mentioned above. Instead, they install a standard set of educational materials and hope that learners find them helpful enough to take them up on their own.
Students rarely do so, and instead use the laptops for recreational purposes—often, to the detriment of their learning see, e. In fact, free netbook initiatives have not only consistently failed to improve academic achievement in math or language e. Some of these initiatives have had small impacts on cognitive skills, but the mechanisms through which those effects occurred remains unclear.
To our knowledge, the only successful deployment of a free laptop initiative was one in which a team of researchers equipped the computers with remedial software. Mo et al. After nine months, the program improved math achievement by 0.
If a school system decides to invest in free laptops, this study suggests that the quality of the software on the laptops is crucial. To date, however, the evidence suggests that children do not learn more from interacting with laptops than they do from textbooks. For example, Bando, Gallego, Gertler, and Romero compared the effect of free laptop and textbook provision in elementary schools in disadvantaged areas of Honduras.
After seven months, students in grades 3 and 6 who had received the laptops performed on par with those who had received the textbooks in math and language. Further, even if textbooks essentially become obsolete at the end of each school year, whereas laptops can be reloaded with new materials for each year, the costs of laptop provision not just the hardware, but also the technical assistance, Internet, and training associated with it are not yet low enough to make them a more cost-effective way of delivering content to learners.
Evidence on the provision of tablets equipped with software is encouraging but limited. For example, de Hoop et al. After 14 months, the intervention had improved student early-grade reading by 0. The multifaceted nature of the program, however, makes it challenging to identify the components that are driving the positive effects. The evaluation found positive impacts in math achievement, but the main study limitation is that it was conducted in a single school.
Another way in which technology may improve educational outcomes is by facilitating the delivery of differentiated or individualized instruction. Most developing countries massively expanded access to schooling in recent decades by building new schools and making education more affordable, both by defraying direct costs, as well as compensating for opportunity costs Duflo, ; World Bank, Consequently, a large number of learners perform well below grade-based curricular expectations see, e.
In this respect, technology is uniquely positioned to complement traditional teaching. This use of technology could help learners master basic skills and help them get more out of schooling. Although many software products evaluated in recent years have been categorized as CAL, many rely on a relatively coarse level of differentiation at an initial stage e.
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