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Students at Rocketship Mateo Elementary working in the Learning Lab.

When it comes to math and literacy software, the choices are vast and varied. But over the past months, I’ve heard a recurring complaint from different school administrators: The quality of literacy software is not as high as that of math.

Why is this the case?

I spoke to Aylan Samouha, chief schools officer at Rocketship Education, a network of charter elementary schools in San Jose that allots 25 percent of students’ time at school in the computer lab, where they use math and literacy software for basic skills mastery. Time in classroom with their teacher is spent on what they call “higher-order thinking” and collaborative projects.

For math, Rocketship uses Dreambox Learning, ST Math, TenMarks and Equatia. For literacy, Compass Learning is used for vocabulary and Rosetta Stone for English language learners. Students also have independent reading time, for which they’re given “comprehension quizzes.” For both math and literacy, students who need more individualized help work in small groups of four or five with math and literacy specialists.

Samouha, who’s in charge of what software the school uses, says that the math software is “much further along than literacy.”

“It’s not like people aren’t trying to crack the code,” he says. “But the truth is that there are aspects of math, particularly at the elementary school level, that lend themselves to online learning more easily.”

In general, he points out, with any form of learning — online or otherwise — basic skills are easier to teach, grasp, and to measure than higher-order thinking and concepts. And although math does involve conceptual thinking, even at the elementary level, it’s easier to break out conceptual skills than in literacy.

Take, for example, multiplication. A student can practice and master multiplication and make improvement on basic skills with varying degrees of understanding of the concept. “A kid can spit out five-times-five quickly, whether they understand what that means,” he says.

But literacy is a different animal. When it comes to vocabulary, the definition of a word is not a simple mathematical equation. A word has different meanings in different contexts, and some have multiple meanings. “To isolate the basic skill of literacy is just much trickier to do,” Samouha says.

What’s more, the successful math software can scaffold the process, working on basic skills that lead to conceptualization, whereas in literacy the conceptualization process is immediate. “Anytime you’re starting to read a sentence, you’re already in the world of conceptual understanding,” he says.

What do they want to accomplish with literacy software? Two things: Comprehension and expression — and “almost everything falls under those big buckets,” Samouha says.

“We want a child to be able to read a text and derive meaning from that, literally understand what the author is trying to say, make connections between the text and their own experiences, and other text they’ve read,” he says. “That’s what real literacy mastery looks like with comprehension.”

With expression, the goal is for the student to be able to communicate verbally and with writing — the ability to express oneself in ways that are grammatically correct, interesting to read, presenting a logical point of view, showing a connection between what they’re reading to their own experiences, all while being as descriptive as possible.

Of course, educators do just that — they isolate each one of those skills and help students work on them individually. “But for a computer to know whether or not there’s a proper self-to-text connection is a lot trickier than finding out if they have the right answer to math problem,” he says. “We are much more cautious and protective on the literacy side. If we saw there was software that was just as effective as Dreambox is in math, we’d do that.”

Which begs the question: Why are we using software to teach literacy, if it’s not as effective.

Samouha says we need both teachers and great software.

“Learning happens best when human beings are freed up to do what they’re best at,” he says. “Teachers didn’t sign up to teach so they can teach short vowel sounds for four months. Or do times table recitation with kids. They’re teachers because they want to teach concepts and ideas.”

And especially in under-served communities, where basic skills are typically in need of “shoring up to such degree that teachers get stuck there, it’s not good for kids or teachers.”

All that said, Compass Learning does have an engaging program, and it’s shown to increase students’ Northwestern Evaluation Association scores, according to Samouha, who describes assessment as a reliable adaptive diagnostic test.

“For the very basic parts of literacy, it’s starting to make itself valuable in the process,” he says. “We’re starting to see benefits, but it’s at early stages. But literacy software right now doesn’t have as much lift as math.”

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A Rocketship student works at the Learning Lab using adaptive software.

The question keeps coming up: What technology should schools invest their money, time, and effort in? During this fraught time in our economy, the decision to invest in tools like adaptive software and other tech devices is sometimes portrayed as excessive or wasteful.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Matt Richtel and Trip Gabriel wrote about software program companies inflating their effectiveness in schools, and how they “ignore well-regarded independent studies that test their products’ effectiveness.” In the next couple of days, we’ll deconstruct the writers’ sources of information — namely the main source for their claim that the technologies are ineffective, the What Works Clearinghouse.

In the meantime, I spoke to Aylon Samouha, Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education, a network of charter schools in the Bay Area that uses software to reinforce basic skills mastery. (You can read more about their hybrid learning program and their competitive scores in this MindShift series). Samouha is in charge of the design and strategy of Rocketship’s hybrid learning model, as well as its teacher and principal training program, among many other things.

Samouha, who lives and breathes educational software and is consumed with finding the best way to integrate technology into the school day, has a very different perspective than what Richtel and Gabriel portray.

First, the facts. In an independent study released in August by SRI International, which conducted a randomized controlled trial using DreamBox Learning, those who used the program for 16 weeks scored 2.3 points higher on the Northwest Evaluation Association math test than those who didn’t — the equivalent to progressing 5.5 points in percentile ranking (for example, from 50 percent to 55.5 percent).

It’s important to note here that not all assessments are created equal, but Samouha believes that the NWEA is an adaptive diagnostic test and a dependable measure because “millions of kids taken it,” he said.

Those students’ gains are not only statistically significant, he said, but the fact that they were achieved in such a short time — 16 weeks — indicates that using the program for an entire school year would show even greater gains.

But Samouha is not a tech evangelist just for the sake of using tech. “It’s true that there’s a lot of time wasted on computers right now. There are wrong ways of doing this. But it’s so clear that we have to figure out how to educate students in the 21^st century in ways that go beyond the traditional classroom model, which was created in the 17^th century in Prussia. The fact that it needs to change is not a question in my mind.”

So how to make this happen? “The more we integrate software with what’s happening in the classroom, the better results we’ll see. That will take work and investment. Schools will have to invest time, content providers will need to invest time and energy into make it more plug-and-play and make it more integrated into the school day.”

But Samouha says the Times article proves the opposite of what the writers end up conveying. “It shouldn’t be a call to stop for investment, but a call to invest more, because we need to get it right,” he said.

What “right” looks like can be debatable, but Samouha believes he has it nailed down — at least in the case of elementary schools. His criteria for successful software are:

• Aligned to common standards, “so we’re all speaking the same language.”
• Data needs to be seamlessly integrated and programs need to be able to talk teach other so teachers can easily make sense of the data.
• Rather than be standalone in their environment, they need to be part of the open Web, so they can be linked to each other. “Right now there are a lot of walls between programs, just like before Steve Jobs agreed to use Microsoft, so people using Macs couldn’t open Microsoft programs,” he said. “Those walls exist now, if you’re trying to quilt together a number of interventions to put the right thing in front of a child at the right time, it makes it much harder when those walls exist.

That’s what Samouha is working towards. But it won’t magically happen. It takes investment from schools, from vendors, from educators. “But we can’t just abandon ship and go back to the traditional school model.”

At the heart of this discussion for the general public and most major media is the question “why.” Why should we bother to invest in all this when we (adults) all turned out just fine with the way we were schooled? Why can’t just teachers keep teaching the way they have been?

Samouha believes that’s a false dichotomy. He’s not arguing that teachers should be replaced by software, but that students will benefit from an array of different learning methods. Software will help them practice drills and basic skills, but teachers will be always be the most important part of the equation.

“People are arguing that it’s either human beings teaching kids or computers,” he said. “But that’s not our answer for anything else. When I want to communicate with my wife, I talk to her in person, I use my cell phone, I e-mail and text, that’s the way of the world. But for some reason, education is exceptionally not like that.”

I also spoke with Samouha about the difference in quality between math and literacy software, and I’ll report back on that in the coming days.

Flickr:dno1967b

By Betsy Corcoran, EdSurge

Teachers who want to use technology in the classroom to its best potential typically face a problem dealing with computers that’s weirdly reminiscent of dealing with a roomful of bright but disruptive students: It can be too much of a good thing.

With sophisticated high-tech tools comes a deluge of data, and for a lot of teachers, finding the right resources at the right moment can be maddeningly difficult. What’s more, the most sophisticated programs, which deliver detailed reports about student progress, don’t share data–which means that teachers can wind up with multiple “data dashboards.”

So educational technology entrepreneurs are starting to offer up a bit of help for both of these programs, according to two reports in today’s EdSurge newsletter.

In Mountain View, a startup nonprofit organization, EdNovo, is doing early “alpha” tests of a Google-like search program for helping teachers find exactly the right digital content at the right time. And in San Francisco, a firm called EdElements just got a huge boost of financing to support its work in building a unified “data dashboard” that can combine data from different programs to help teachers avoid an air-traffic-control like problem as they try to mix and match the tools they use.

First EdNovo: with a team of almost a dozen educators and engineers, former Google executive Prasad Ram is building a free search engine he calls “Gooru” to retrieve digital content starting with math and science. So far, the team has tagged and organized 20,000 free resources on the web, along with 1,200 class plans and “classbooks,” which are effectively playlists for learning. The effort is still very much under construction. Some 300 educators, including teachers at Oakland International High School, Milpitas Unified School District and FlipSchool are providing the first feedback. But Gooru promises to deliver what educators have long dreamed of: an education-specific search engine that pulls up timely and usable material for teachers. Educators can request a chance to try out the program here. [Update: Gooru is now open to any user.]

There are also a wide range of more comprehensive teaching programs that many schools are using to create so called “blended learning” models: fusions of teacher-led and computer assisted instruction. (Heather Staker of the Innosight Institute offers more detailed definitions of blended learning here.)

A bevy of ed-tech programs are emerging to serve as this kind of teacher’s right-hand aide: for instance, Dreambox Learning helps K-3 students develop their math skills; Compass Learning offers a broad suite of K-12 programs.

In most cases, teachers trying these programs out want to mix and match their options like picking out a box of mixed chocolates. Why not some Dreambox for math and then a little Accelerated Reader for language arts?

But the nail-biting truth about mixing up these sophisticated learning programs is that each one has its own, carefully designed “data dashboard.” Use three programs and you’ll wind up staring at three data dashboards. What’s needed is a way to get the programs to talk and share data–or a way to build a single “data dashboard,” that can channel the reports from individual programs and portray a single, coherent report.

There are a handful of efforts to build such uber-dashboards.  Charter school program Rocketship Education has been growing its own, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is also fostering the development of common standards that could be used more broadly by any program. New York City’s school district has worked with a program called Desire2Learn to craft a dashboard.

And then there’s San Francisco EdElements, run by Anthony Kim. Kim is one of the country’s leading blended learning consultants. He’s worked with KIPP and IDEA schools to create blended learning programs in those schools. Along the way, his team has begun partnering with different ed-tech companies to wire up their programs to return data to a single dashboard–something Kim calls a “Hybrid Learning Management System.” So far, Kim’s team works with 15 different vendors.

Kim’s efforts got a boost this week by a $2.1 million equity investment by investors that include the NewSchools Venture Fund, Tugboat Ventures, venture capitalist, Wally Hawley, and the three founders of edtech incubator, ImagineK12.

It’ll be interesting to watch how these two intriguing ways could help teachers be more incommand of the explosion of emerging digital tools.