By Tommy Wells, Alonzo Lepper, and Amy Auletto
Teachers are responsible for making instructional decisions that impact their students’ trajectories, including decisions around tailoring students’ experiences on digital learning platforms. In this report, we explore teachers’ use of i-Ready Personalized Instruction program to modify learning experiences for their students by assigning math and reading lessons beyond those i-Ready already assigns. We examined a national sample of elementary school teachers over the course of the 2022-2023 school year. The sample consisted of 300 million math and reading lessons completed by 3.7 million students in thousands of schools.
Our key findings:
- Teachers’ approaches to modifying learning experiences on digital learning platforms vary by subject, student grade level, student baseline achievement, and schools’ years of use of the digital platform.
- Students were more likely to complete teacher-assigned math lessons than reading lessons.
- Of the lessons teachers assigned in math, a greater proportion were on or above grade level than those assigned in reading.
- Teacher-assigned lessons were more common in upper elementary grades.
- Teacher-assigned lessons were more common in schools that used the digital learning platform for longer.
Suggested citation:
Wells, T., Lepper, A., & Auletto, A. (2024). Elementary School Teachers’ Modification of Digital Learning Tools. Evanston, IL: Center for Education Efficacy, Excellence, and Equity, Northwestern University. https://e4.northwestern.edu/