Guideline #10: Use Caution in Handling Confidential Information

If you’re a K-12 educator or edtech provider, how can you make sure an edtech product will work in a specific school or community? Here’s one of 16 key guidelines for conducting and reporting edtech impact research that might help.

Edtech Research Guideline 10: Use caution in handling confidential information especially personally identifiable information (PII)

The issues around getting data for research have been made more sensitive by the controversy and public concern about online privacy and the possibility of providers using student profile information for commercial purposes. However, cloud-based usage data can be considered essential in research on edtech products.

This guideline comes from the third section of the report, “Implementing the Design,” which focuses on actual implementation of the research design. The researcher may have devised an excellent design with clear research questions, sensitive measures, and clearly differentiated comparisons, but now he or she must make it happen.

A preview of other guidelines in this section include:

11. Pay attention to implementation, but not too much attention

12. Work with researchers who can be objective and independent

For all audiences, the Guidelines not only provide approaches to practice, but also seek to advance the field by helping to identify an appropriate balance among the rigor, practicality, timeliness, and usefulness of evaluation studies of K-12 edtech products

This post is one in a series based on excerpts from the Edtech Guidelines published by Empirical Education and ETIN. For more information, you may access the full set of guidelines, here.