Education & learning publications

Through the lens of the Apple and ConnectED Initiative, this report asks the questions, what does a promising start look like when you add technology to education and what types of support can enable conditions for success?
Technology, such as iPad™ devices for students and teachers, has the potential to energize classrooms and bring substantially new types of learning opportunities to children of all ages. These changes are not an automatic result of adding technology to education, and they often take place over a long period of time. This report asks the questions, what does a promising start look like and what types of support can enable conditions for success?
We ask these questions through the lens of the Apple and ConnectED Initiative, which has been the focus of a rigorous 6-year research study. Launched in 2014, the Apple and ConnectED Initiative has supported 114 participating schools across the country with an iPad for every student. Schools received a host of programmatic supports including extensive professional learning opportunities for teachers and leaders, technology infrastructure upgrades, and process management.
The initiative and this research are explicitly situated in a diversity of traditionally under-resourced communities, with schools ranging from pre-K to secondary and from the inner city to rural migrant communities to Native American villages. This report focuses on the first year of iPad use across these schools to describe the initial changes that might be expected to appear when sufficient support is in place to lower common barriers to its adoption.
The report describes early implementation in three successive stages:

Access: Many of the ConnectED schools saw daily iPad use across multiple subjects, even early in implementation. This level of use was facilitated by strategic and technical preparation prior to the introduction of the iPad devices, coupled with initial strategies for their instructional application. Daily widespread use demonstrated how universal technology access has the potential to “level the playing field” and broaden students’ horizons.
Integration: In classrooms where iPad use had become the norm, the learning environments looked different from those in typical classroom settings. In particular, iPad classrooms leveraged immediate access to rich information, offered new opportunities for expression, used technology to increase student engagement, and benefited from more organized and efficient workflows.
Innovation: In addition to more active and engaging learning environments, technology is often seen as holding promise to facilitate meaningful changes to students’ opportunities for learning. This study uses a framework for “deeper learning” to describe emerging opportunities for teamwork, critical thinking, and other skills that prepare students for success beyond the classroom. Teacher surveys and a review of lesson plans reveal some initial steps toward deeper learning for a broad range of teachers, particularly in the dimensions of personalization and communication/creation that were most directly enabled by the affordances of the new iPad devices. More advanced opportunities require careful and creative lesson planning, and were most likely to be seen in the classrooms of teachers who held deeper learning as an explicit goal.

SRI and TERC, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, conducted case studies of teachers participating in the Zearn Math Curriculum Study Professional Development (CS PD) to learn whether and how teachers’ participation in CS PD led to pedagogical content knowledge growth.

Young children are suspended and expelled from early childhood education programs at high rates. Evidence indicates that this form of exclusion can have negative implications for children’s development and later school success (Adamu & Hogan, 2015; U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2016). In response, the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant requires states to develop policies to prevent the use of exclusionary practices in early childhood programs. As state administrators seek to implement policies that reduce suspension and expulsion, many are interested in learning how to better prepare the workforce to address the behavioral challenges that lead to suspension and expulsion (Conners et al., 2018). The administrators at the Arkansas Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education (AR DCCECE), which administers the state Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) to support the care of more than 3,500 children birth to age 5 each year, have implemented a set of policies and initiatives intended to support young children’s social-emotional (SE) development, reduce the use of exclusionary practices in their Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) funded programs, and promote overall child care program quality. These initiatives aim to reduce the use of exclusionary practices while giving teachers and providers the necessary tools for creating environments and interactional approaches that support positive social-emotional development.
This report summarizes the existing administrative data infrastructure and recommendations for the Arkansas Suspension and Expulsion Work Group with the next steps to support better use of administrative data. Its purpose is to inform the implementation of Arkansas’ expulsion prevention policy and the use of supports that enable providers to meet the needs of children with challenging behaviors. The recommendations in this report are based on our work with the Arkansas Suspension and Expulsion Work Group led by AR DCCECE.