Education Week - April 15, 2015 - Special Report - S14

S14 |
EDUCATION WEEK n
April 15, 2015
Blended Learning: Breaking Down Barriers > www.edweek.org/go/blended-barriers
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Ms. Patrick. "It's hard to make general statements about
blended learning when 20 different schools have 20 different
models."
Ms. Mohammed noted that there are "lots of different
flavors" of blended learning," and "the ecosystem has not
really congealed around a definition."
Parsing Imperfect Measures
And even when studies are all looking at the same
learning model, that research is often focused on adults,
not school-age users.
A 2010 federal study underscored the scope of the challenge.
The Education Department took a broad look at all
available studies of online learning, including blended approaches.
From 1996 through 2006-the decade in which
the Internet rapidly evolved and became ubiquitous-there
were no experimental or controlled studies at all comparing
online and in-person instruction for K-12 students.
The analysis ultimately found that students in
blended-learning classes outperformed those in fully
online or fully in-person classes and spent significantly
more time on task. But it also found no significant improvements
for K-12 students, for good reason: Out of
46 studies included, nearly all examined college-age or
adult professional students.
Only five studies covered K-12 education, and they
examined academic gains in a variety of subjects and
age groups-8th grade social studies, 8th and 9th grade
algebra, middle school Spanish, elementary special education-and,
for a group of schools in Taiwan, 5th grade
science.
Drawing meaningful conclusions from comparisons of
adults' and students' experiences with blended learning
is difficult, researchers say. College students, and adults
taking on-the-job training courses, may have considerably
more focus and motivation to use self-paced, computerbased
instruction than K-12 students do, particularly at
earlier grades.
One ongoing study by the rand Corp. for the Gates Foundation
is trying to tease out how blended learning plays out
in lower grades. Researchers are chronicling how nearly
60 charter and regular district schools implement blended
learning, and whether it improves student achievement.
An interim report, covering 23 charter schools and nearly
5,000 students, found students at two-thirds of schools
that used blended learning made statistically significant
gains on either math or reading tests. But researchers also
warned that it isn't yet possible to know "which particular
instructional approaches may account for the positive
student-learning outcomes."
Of the schools that have seen gains, "it's hard to say if
these are just really strong charter schools, or if [blended
learning] is playing a role," said John F. Pane, a senior scientist
at the rand Corp., who is working on the evaluation.
Racing the Clock
The time frame for experimental research-five to seven
years for most randomized controlled trials-is seen as a
problem for conducting studies of education. It poses even
greater obstacles for evaluating blended learning, in which
iterations of software and curriculum can shift dramatically
from year to year.
"The things we have a lot of evidence for-things like
early-reading development, personalizing-took decades"
to research, Ms. Mohammed said. "I'm not sure that sort of
framework is going to be useful in blended learning, where
the technology and innovations are changing so rapidly."
From a research standpoint, online instruction would
seem to have one clear advantage over in-person instruction:
A researcher can't follow a student's thought process
as he takes a test, but online programs like Carnegie's
Cognitive Tutor can track practically every keystroke entered
by every student using the program, allowing analysis
not only of what questions a student answers correctly,
It's hard to make general statements
about blended learning when 20 different
schools have 20 different models."
SUSAN D. PATRICK
President and Chief Executive Officer
International Association for K-12 Online Learning
but how he approaches and works through a problem.
So-called "big data" hold potential to reveal whether
a student really understands and can apply a concept,
Mr. Pane said, but it's proved to be far from a panacea. The
positive results found in a recent evaluation of Cognitive
Tutor's blended-learning program, for example, remain in
"a black box," with researchers still unsure what exactly
caused the improvements in math performance.
"It's a huge volume of data and making sense of it is very
challenging," Mr. Pane said. "You get a bunch of keystrokes,
but unless you know what was on the screen when those
keystrokes were happening, it's mind-bogglingly hard to
analyze."
Mr. Horn and Ms. Patrick call for less focus on evaluating
individual blended-learning software and programs based
only on test scores, and more support for identifying which
outcomes schools want, then building measures to test those.
School leaders should not think of online or blended learning
as fundamentally different from traditional classroom
learning, Ms. Mohammed said. The research suggests they
should instead implement it when they "want to solve specific
instructional problems," she observed.
"We have not focused on whether learning is actually
different in the two different environments," Ms. Mohammed
said. "If you take an ineffective practice in faceto-face
instruction and move it to an online setting, you
shouldn't expect better learning." n
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Education Week - April 15, 2015 - Special Report

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