Guideline #15: Make all Findings from Product Evaluations Available, as a General Rule
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 15: Make all findings from product evaluations available, as a general rule
Conducting a rigorous study of product effectiveness can be a serious risk for an edtech provider. If the experiment shows a positive effect, that is good news, but if there’s no discernible effect, or worse, the comparison group does significantly better, this may be a blow to a planned marketing campaign. In the fast-paced world of edtech development, there are approaches to mitigating this risk, most importantly, not depending on a single study by setting up a program of research. But it is important to understand that not making a study public can reduce educators’ trust in the provider’s product and in industry research as a whole.
This guideline comes from the fourth section of the report, “Reporting the Results,” which focuses on good practices in reporting results from the research study. The need for evidence on quickly evolving products and the availability of non-traditional repositories is changing the landscape of reporting. We also address the question of risk to the edtech provider in supporting research that shows a negative (or not sufficiently robust) effect of the product.
A preview of other guidelines in this section include:
14. Make the research report easily accessible and invite external review
16. In the marketing literature for a product, accurately describe its impact in non-technical language
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.
