Efficacy and evidence

Pearson’s ‘Efficacy’ initiative is a series of ‘commitments designed to measure and increase the company’s impact on learning outcomes around the world’. The company’s dedicated website  offers two glossy brochures with a wide range of interesting articles, a good questionnaire tool that can be used by anyone to measure the efficacy of their own educational products or services, as well as an excellent selection of links to other articles, some of which are critical of the initiative. These include Michael Feldstein’s long blog post  ‘Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube?’ which should be a first port of call for anyone wanting to understand better what is going on.

What does it all boil down to? The preface to Pearson’s ‘Asking More: the Path to Efficacy’ by CEO John Fallon provides a succinct introduction. Efficacy in education, says Fallon, is ‘making a measurable impact on someone’s life through learning’. ‘Measurable’ is the key word, because, as Fallon continues, ‘it is increasingly possible to determine what works and what doesn’t in education, just as in healthcare.’ We need ‘a relentless focus’ on ‘the learning outcomes we deliver’ because it is these outcomes that can be measured in ‘a systematic, evidence-based fashion’. Measurement, of course, is all the easier when education is delivered online, ‘real-time learner data’ can be captured, and the power of analytics can be deployed.

Pearson are very clearly aligning themselves with recent moves towards a more evidence-based education. In the US, Obama’s Race to the Top is one manifestation of this shift. Britain (with, for example, the Education Endowment Foundation) and France (with its Fonds d’Expérimentation pour la Jeunesse ) are both going in the same direction. Efficacy is all about evidence-based practice.

Both the terms ‘efficacy’ and ‘evidence-based practice’ come originally from healthcare. Fallon references this connection in the quote two paragraphs above. In the UK last year, Ben Goldacre (medical doctor, author of ‘Bad Science’ and a relentless campaigner against pseudo-science) was commissioned by the UK government to write a paper entitled ‘Building Evidence into Education’ . In this, he argued for the need to introduce randomized controlled trials into education in a similar way to their use in medicine.

As Fallon observed in the preface to the Pearson ‘Efficacy’ brochure, this all sounds like ‘common sense’. But, as Ben Goldacre discovered, things are not so straightforward in education. An excellent article in The Guardian outlined some of the problems in Goldacre’s paper.

With regard to ELT, Pearson’s ‘Efficacy’ initiative will stand or fall with the validity of their Global Scale of English, discussed in my March post ‘Knowledge Graphs’ . However, there are a number of other considerations that make the whole evidence-based / efficacy business rather less common-sensical than might appear at first glance.

• The purpose of English language teaching and learning (at least, in compulsory education) is rather more than simply the mastery of grammatical and lexical systems, or the development of particular language skills. Some of these other purposes (e.g. the development of intercultural competence or the acquisition of certain 21^st century skills, such as creativity) continue to be debated. There is very little consensus about the details of what these purposes (or outcomes) might be, or how they can be defined. Without consensus about these purposes / outcomes, it is not possible to measure them.
• Even if we were able to reach a clear consensus, many of these outcomes do not easily lend themselves to measurement, and even less to low-cost measurement.
• Although we clearly need to know what ‘works’ and what ‘doesn’t work’ in language teaching, there is a problem in assigning numerical values. As the EduThink blog observes, ‘the assignation of numerical values is contestable, problematic and complex. As teachers and researchers we should be engaging with the complexity [of education] rather than the reductive simplicities of [assigning numerical values]’.
• Evidence-based medicine has resulted in unquestionable progress, but it is not without its fierce critics. A short summary of the criticisms can be found here .  It would be extremely risky to assume that a contested research procedure from one discipline can be uncritically applied to another.
• Kathleen Graves, in her plenary at IATEFL 2014, ‘The Efficiency of Inefficiency’, explicitly linked health care and language teaching. She described a hospital where patient care was as much about human relationships as it was about medical treatment, an aspect of the hospital that went unnoticed by efficiency experts, since this could not be measured. See this blog for a summary of her talk.

These issues need to be discussed much further before we get swept away by the evidence-based bandwagon. If they are not, the real danger is that, as John Fallon cautions, we end up counting things that don’t really count, and we don’t count the things that really do count. Somehow, I doubt that an instrument like the Global Scale of English will do the trick.

Saving the world (adaptive marketing)

‘Adaptive’ is a buzzword in the marketing of educational products. Chris Dragon, President of Pearson Digital Learning, complained on the Pearson Research blog. that there are so many EdTech providers claiming to be ‘adaptive’ that you have to wonder if they are not using the term too loosely. He talks about semantic satiation, the process whereby ‘temporary loss of meaning [is] experienced when one is exposed to the uninterrupted repetition of a word or phrase’. He then goes on to claim that Pearson’s SuccessMaker (‘educational software that differentiates and personalizes K-8 reading and math instruction’) is the real adaptive McCoy.

‘Adaptive’ is also a buzzword in marketing itself. Google the phrase ‘adaptive marketing’ and you’ll quickly come up with things like Adaptive Marketing Set to Become the Next Big Thing or Adaptive marketing changes the name of the game. Adaptive marketing is what you might expect: the use of big data to track customers and enable ‘marketers to truly tailor their activities in rapid and unparalleled ways to meet their customers’ interests and needs’ (Advertising Age, February 2012). It strikes me that this sets up an extraordinary potential loop: students using adaptive learning software that generates a huge amount of data which could then be used by adaptive marketers to sell other products.

I decided it might be interesting to look at the way one adaptive software company markets itself. Knewton, for example, which claims its products are more adaptive than anybody else’s.

Knewton clearly spend a lot of time and money on their marketing efforts. There is their blog and a magazine called ‘The Knerd’. There are very regular interviews by senior executives with newspapers, magazines and other blogs. There are very frequent conference presentations. All of these are easily accessible, so it is quite easy to trace Knewton’s marketing message. And even easier when they are so open about it. David Liu, Chief Operating Officer has given an interview  in which he outlines his company’s marketing strategy. Knewton, he says, focuses on driving organic interests and traffic. To that end, we have a digital marketing group that’s highly skilled and focused on creating content marketing so users, influencers and partners alike can understand our product, the value we bring and how to work with us. We also use a lot of advanced digital and online lead generation type of techniques to target potential partners and users to be able to get the right people in those discussions.

The message consists of four main strands, which I will call EdTech, EduCation, EduBusiness and EdUtopia. Depending on the audience, the marketing message will be adapted, with one or other of these strands given more prominence.

1 EdTech

Hardly surprisingly, Knewton focuses on what they call their ‘heavy duty infrastructure for an adaptive world’. They are very proud of their adaptive credentials, their ‘rigorous data science’. The basic message is that ‘only Knewton provides true personalization for any student, anywhere’. They are not shy of using technical jargon and providing technical details to prove their point.

2 EduCation

The key message here is effectiveness (Knewton also uses the term ‘efficacy’). Statistics about growth in pass rates and reduction in withdrawal rates at institutions are cited. At the same time, teachers are directly appealed to with statements like ‘as a teacher, you get tools you never had before’ and ‘teachers will be able to add their own content, upload it, tag it and seamlessly use it’. Accompanying this fairly direct approach is a focus on buzz words and phrases which can be expected to resonate with teachers. Recent blog posts include in their headlines: ‘supporting creativity’, ‘student-centred learning’, ‘peer mentoring’, ‘formative evaluation’, ‘continuous assessment’, ‘learning styles’, ‘scaffolding instruction’, ‘real-world examples’, ‘enrichment’ or ‘lifelong learning’.

There is an apparent openness in Knewton’s readiness to communicate with the rest of the world. The blog invites readers to start discussions and post comments. Almost no one does. But one blog post by Jose Ferreira called ‘Rebooting Learning Styles’  provoked a flurry of highly critical and well-informed responses. These remain unanswered. A similar thing happened when David Liu did a guest post at eltjam. A flurry of criticism, but no response. My interpretation of this is that Knewton are a little scared of engaging in debate and of having their marketing message hijacked.

3 EduBusiness

Here’s a sample of ways that Knewton speak to potential customers and investors:

an enormous new market of online courses that bring high margin revenue and rapid growth for institutions that start offering them early and declining numbers for those who do not.

Because Knewton is trying to disrupt the traditional industry, we have nothing to lose—we’re not cannibalising ourselves—by partnering.

Unlike other groups dabbling in adaptive learning, Knewton doesn’t force you to buy pre-fabricated products using our own content. Our platform makes it possible for anyone — publishers, instructors, app developers, and others — to build her own adaptive applications using any content she likes.

The data platform industries tend to have a winner-take-all dynamic. You take that and multiply it by a very, very high-stakes product and you get an even more winner-take-all dynamic.

4 EdUtopia

I personally find this fourth strand the most interesting. Knewton are not unique in adopting this line, but it is a sign of their ambition that they choose to do so. All of the quotes that follow are from Jose Ferreira:

We can’t improve education by curing poverty. We have to cure poverty by improving education.

Edtech is our best hope to narrow — at scale — the Achievement Gap between rich and poor. Yet, for a time, it will increase that gap. Society must push past that unfortunate moment and use tech-assisted outcome improvements as the rationale to drive spending in poor schools.

I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world’s education system. Education is among the most important problems we face, because it’s the ultimate “gateway” problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there’s a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too. So in fact, I started Knewton not just to help fix education but to try to fix just about everything.

What if the girl who invents the cure for ovarian cancer is growing up in a Cambodian fishing village and otherwise wouldn’t have a chance? As distribution of technology continues to improve, adaptive learning will give her and similar students countless opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

But our ultimate vision – and what really motivated me to start the company – is to solve the access problem for the human race once and for all. Only 22% of the world finishes high school; only 55% finish sixth grade. This is a preventable tragedy. Adaptive learning can give students around the world access to high-quality education they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Voxy – ‘the future of language learning’?

Voxy is another language learning platform that likes to tout itself as ‘the future of language learning’. It has over 2.5 million users and claims to be the No. 1 education iTunes app in 23 countries. Pearson is a major investor and has a seat on the Voxy board. Unsurprisingly, it boasts ‘a new sophisticated and patented adaptive learning technology, […] a dynamic feedback loop which results in lessons and courses that calibrate to the learner. These improvements are fundamental to what makes Voxy unique as lessons become even more personalized.’

Voxy uses an integrated web / mobile / SMS platform to deliver its learning programme, which is based around authentic, up-to-date texts. I spent a morning as an advanced learner of English exploring what it had to offer. In what I did, everything was in English, but I imagine this is not the case for lower-level learners. Voxy was originally launched for speakers of Spanish and Portuguese.

As far as I could tell, there is very little that is (what I would call) adaptive. There is, no doubt, adaptive software at work in the vocabulary revision exercises, but it’s hard to see this operating. Before starting, users are asked about their level and what they want to ‘accomplish with English’. The six possible answers are ‘advance my career’, ‘enjoy English media’, ‘pass my English tests’, ‘travel abroad’. ‘day-to-day tasks’ and ‘social and lifestyle’. I was next asked about my interests, and the possible answers here were sports, celebrities and entertainment, business, technology, health and politics. Having answered these questions, my personalized course was ready.

I was offered a deal of $20 a month, with a free trial. This gave me access to the main course, a faily rudimentary grammar guide, a list of words I had ‘studied’, a proficiency test (reading, listening and TOEFL-style M/C grammar) and 13 hours with a ‘live’ tutor.

I decided that I couldn’t pretend to be a real learner and hook up with a tutor. Users can choose a tutor from a menu where the tutors are photographed (obligatory smile). They are young graduates and some, but not all, are described as having ‘Certification: Teaching English’, whatever this means. There are also tutor statements, one of which reads ‘I love that both teaching and studying foreign languages are abound with opportunities to experience international differences and similarities on a personal level’ (sic).

I concentrated on the main course which offered 18 lessons related to each of my declared interests. These were based on authentic texts from sources like Financial Times and New York Daily News. These were generally interesting and up-to-date. In some cases, the article was only 24 hours old.

The usual procedure was to (1) read the text, (2) tap on highlighted words, which would bring up dictionary definitions and a recording of the word, (3) listen to a recording of the text (read very slowly – far too slowly for anyone with an advanced level), (4) answer 2 -4 multiple choice questions, (5) be shown short gapped extracts from the text alongside 4 or 5 boxes, which, when you click on them gave a recording of different words, one of which was the correct answer to the highlighted gap in the text, and (6) do a word – definition matching task (the words from stage 5).

According to Wikipedia, Voxy is based on the principles of task-based language teaching. Jane Willis might beg to differ. What I saw was closer to those pre-1970s textbooks where texts were followed by glossaries. Voxy is technologically advanced, but methodologically, it is positively antediluvian.

A further problem concerns task design. Perhaps because the tasks that accompany the texts have to be produced very quickly (if the texts are really to be hot off the press), there were errors that no experienced materials writer would make, and no experienced ELT editor would fail to spot. The sorts of problems that I identifed included the following:

• No clear rationale in the selection of vocabulary items; no apparent awareness of word difficulty or frequency.
• No clear rationale in the selection of multiple choice items.
• Many M/C vocabulary questions can be answered without understanding the word (simply by using the memory).
• Vocabulary definition matching tasks often contain language in the definitions which is more complex than the target item.
• The vocabulary definition matching tasks can mostly be done simply by eliminating the distractors (which have been plucked out of thin air, and have not previously appeared).
• The definitions in these matching tasks often do not use the same grammar as the target item (e.g. an infinitive in the definition has to be matched to a participle target word).
• Errors (e.g. ‘The brain reacts more strongly to rejection in real life that online rejection’ (sic) in one M/C item).

I could go on. The material has clearly not been written by experienced writers, it has not been properly edited or trialled. The texts may be interesting, but that’s the only positive that I can offer for the main part of the course that I looked at.

My greatest disappointment concerns the poor use that the technology has been put to. Contrary to Voxy’s claims, this is not a new way to learn a language, it’s not particularly fun and it’s hard to believe that it could be effective. Perhaps my, admittedly limited, experience with Voxy’s product was unrepresentative. Using authentic materials is a good idea, but this needs to be combined with decent social networking possibilities, a much more sophisticated use of adaptive technology, proper investment in item-writers and editors, and more. The future of language learning? Probably not.

EdTech and neo-liberalism: fragment of a network

In Part 9 of the ‘guide’ on this blog (neo-liberalism and solutionism), I suggested that the major advocates of adaptive learning form a complex network of vested neo-liberal interests. Along with adaptive learning and the digital delivery of educational content, they promote a free-market, for-profit, ‘choice’-oriented (charter schools in the US and academies in the UK) ideology. The discourses of these advocates are explored in a fascinating article by Neil Selwyn, ‘Discourses of digital ‘disruption’ in education: a critical analysis’ which can be accessed here.

Stephen Ball includes a detailed chart of this kind of network in his ‘Global Education Inc.’ (Routledge 2012). I thought it would be interesting to attempt a similar, but less ambitious, chart of my own. Sugata Mitra’s plenary talk at the IATEFL conference yesterday has generated a lot of discussion, so I thought it would be interesting to focus on him. What such charts demonstrate very clearly is that there is a very close interlinking between EdTech advocacy and a wider raft of issues on the neo-liberal wish list. Adaptive learning developments (or, for example, schools in the cloud) need to be understood in a broader context … in the same way that Mitra, Tooley, Gates et al understand these technologies.

In order to understand the chart, you will need to look at the notes below. Many more nodes could be introduced, but I have tried my best to keep things simple. All of the information here is publicly available, but I found Stephen Ball’s work especially helpful.

People

Bill Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

James Tooley is the Director of the E.G. West Centre. He is a founder of the Educare Trust, founder and chairman of Omega Schools, president of Orient Global, chairman of Rumi School of Excellence, and a former consultant to the International Finance Corporation. He is also a member of the advisory council of the Institute of Economic Affairs and was responsible for creating the Education and Training Unit at the Institute.

Michael Barber is Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor and Chairman of Pearson’s $15 million Affordable Learning Fund. He is also an advisor on ‘deliverology’ to the International Finance Corporation.

Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the E.G. West Centre and he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT. He is best known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment. In 2013, he won the $1 million TED Prize to develop his idea of a ‘school-in-the-cloud’.

Institutions

Hiwel (Hole-in-the-Wall Education Limited) is the company behind Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiment. It is a subsidiary of NIIT.

NIIT Limited is an Indian company based in Gurgaon, India that operates several for-profit higher education institutions.

Omega Schools is a privately held chain of affordable, for-profit schools based in Ghana.There are currently 38 schools educating over 20,000 students.

Orient Global is a Singapore-based investment group, which bought a $48 million stake in NIIT.

Pearson is … Pearson. Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund was set up to invest in private companies committed to innovative approaches. Its first investment was a stake in Omega Schools.

Rumi Schools of Excellence is Orient Global’s chain of low-cost private schools in India, which aims to extend access and improve educational quality through affordable private schooling.

School-in-the-cloud is described by Mitra as’ a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online’. Microsoft are the key sponsors.

The E.G. West Centre of the University of Newcastle is dedicated to generating knowledge and understanding about how markets and self organising systems work in education.

The Educare Trustis a non-profit agency, formed in 2002 by Professor James Tooley of the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, and other members associated with private unaided schools in India.It is advised by an international team from the University of Newcastle. It services include the running of a loan scheme for schools to improve their infrastructure and facilities.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a right-wing free market think tank in London whose stated mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.

The International Finance Corporation is an international financial institution which offers investment, advisory, and asset management services to encourage private sector development in developing countries. The IFC is a member of the World Bank Group.

The Templeton Foundation is a philanthropic organization that funds inter-disciplinary research about human purpose and ultimate reality. Described by Barbara Ehrenreich as a ‘right wing venture’, it has a history of supporting the Cato Institute (publishers of Tooley’s most well-known book) , a libertarian think-tank, as well as projects at major research centers and universities that explore themes related to free market economics.

Additional connections

Barber is an old friend of Tooley’s from when both men were working in Zimbabwe in the 1990s.

Omega Schools are taking part in Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize Schools in the Cloud project.

Omega Schools use textbooks developed by Pearson.

Orient Global sponsored an Education Development fund at Newcastle University. The project leaders were Tooley and Mitra. They also sponsored the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment.

Pearson, the Pearson Foundation, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation work closely together on a wide variety of projects.

Some of Tooley’s work for the Educare Trust was funded by the Templeton Trust. Tooley was also winner of the 2006 Templeton Freedom Prize for Excellence.

The International Finance Corporation and the Gates Foundation are joint sponsors of a $60 million project to improve health in Nigeria.

The International Finance Corporation was another sponsor of the Hole-in-the-Wall experiment.

Personalization for all

Personalization is one of the key leitmotifs in current educational discourse. The message is clear: personalization is good, one-size-fits-all is bad. ‘How to personalize learning and how to differentiate instruction for diverse classrooms are two of the great educational challenges of the 21^st century,’ write Trilling and Fadel, leading lights in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21)[1]. Barack Obama has repeatedly sung the praises of, and the need for, personalized learning and his policies are fleshed out by his Secretary of State, Arne Duncan, in speeches and on the White House blog: ‘President Obama described the promise of personalized learning when he launched the ConnectED initiative last June. Technology is a powerful tool that helps create robust personalized learning environments.’ In the UK, personalized learning has been government mantra for over 10 years. The EU, UNESCO, OECD, the Gates Foundation – everyone, it seems, is singing the same tune.

Personalization, we might all agree, is a good thing. How could it be otherwise? No one these days is going to promote depersonalization or impersonalization in education. What exactly it means, however, is less clear. According to a UNESCO Policy Brief[2], the term was first used in the context of education in the 1970s by Victor Garcìa Hoz, a senior Spanish educationalist and member of Opus Dei at the University of Madrid. This UNESCO document then points out that ‘unfortunately, up to this date there is no single definition of this concept’.

In ELT, the term has been used in a very wide variety of ways. These range from the far-reaching ideas of people like Gertrude Moskowitz, who advocated a fundamentally learner-centred form of instruction, to the much more banal practice of getting students to produce a few personalized examples of an item of grammar they have just studied. See Scott Thornbury’s A-Z blog for an interesting discussion of personalization in ELT.

As with education in general, and ELT in particular, ‘personalization’ is also bandied around the adaptive learning table. Duolingo advertises itself as the opposite of one-size-fits-all, and as an online equivalent of the ‘personalized education you can get from a small classroom teacher or private tutor’. Babbel offers a ‘personalized review manager’ and Rosetta Stone’s Classroom online solution allows educational institutions ‘to shift their language program away from a ‘one-size-fits-all-curriculum’ to a more individualized approach’. As far as I can tell, the personalization in these examples is extremely restricted. The language syllabus is fixed and although users can take different routes up the ‘skills tree’ or ‘knowledge graph’, they are totally confined by the pre-determination of those trees and graphs. This is no more personalized learning than asking students to make five true sentences using the present perfect. Arguably, it is even less!

This is not, in any case, the kind of personalization that Obama, the Gates Foundation, Knewton, et al have in mind when they conflate adaptive learning with personalization. Their definition is much broader and summarised in the US National Education Technology Plan of 2010: ‘Personalized learning means instruction is paced to learning needs, tailored to learning preferences, and tailored to the specific interests of different learners. In an environment that is fully personalized, the learning objectives and content as well as the method and pace may all vary (so personalization encompasses differentiation and individualization).’ What drives this is the big data generated by the students’ interactions with the technology (see ‘Part 4: big data and analytics’ of ‘The Guide’ on this blog).

What remains unclear is exactly how this might work in English language learning. Adaptive software can only personalize to the extent that the content of an English language learning programme allows it to do so. It may be true that each student using adaptive software ‘gets a more personalised experience no matter whose content the student is consuming’, as Knewton’s David Liu puts it. But the potential for any really meaningful personalization depends crucially on the nature and extent of this content, along with the possibility of variable learning outcomes. For this reason, we are not likely to see any truly personalized large-scale adaptive learning programs for English any time soon.

Nevertheless, technology is now central to personalized language learning. A good learning platform, which allows learners to connect to ‘social networking systems, podcasts, wikis, blogs, encyclopedias, online dictionaries, webinars, online English courses, various apps’, etc (see Alexandra Chistyakova’s eltdiary), means that personalization could be more easily achieved.

For the time being, at least, adaptive learning systems would seem to work best for ‘those things that can be easily digitized and tested like math problems and reading passages’ writes Barbara Bray . Or low level vocabulary and grammar McNuggets, we might add. Ideal for, say, ‘English Grammar in Use’. But meaningfully personalized language learning?

‘Personalized learning’ sounds very progressive, a utopian educational horizon, and it sounds like it ought to be the future of ELT (as Cleve Miller argues). It also sounds like a pretty good slogan on which to hitch the adaptive bandwagon. But somehow, just somehow, I suspect that when it comes to adaptive learning we’re more likely to see more testing, more data collection and more depersonalization.

[1] Trilling, B. & Fadel, C. 2009 21^st Century Skills (San Francisco: Wiley) p.33

[2] Personalized learning: a new ICT­enabled education approach, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, Policy Brief March 2012 iite.unesco.org/pics/publications/en/files/3214716.pdf