Rising Research Voices
Our Rising Research Voices series showcases the work of emerging talents within the E4 Center and beyond. Authored by junior staff and graduate students, these insightful research reports offer fresh perspectives and innovative approaches to current research topics.
Author bio: Charlie Guan is a doctoral student in in Industrial Engineering and Management Science in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering.
Abstract: Online learning tools have become an integral component of K-8 education in the last decade, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 13 million users in the 2022-2023 school year on one platform alone. The rapid emergence of these tools invites inquiry into the ways they are used so that we can understand how to optimize implementation. I used the available data from one digital tool, i-Ready, in a five-year span (2017-2022) to measure usage trends and uncovered the following trends:
- Students in schools that administer digital tools to the entire grade use them more consistently throughout the school year, while students in schools that administer digital tools to a small subset of the grade use them sparingly in the school year.
- Some schools that administer digital tools to a small subset of the grade use them as supplemental tool for students placing below-grade in assessments.
- In schools with gradewide administration of digital tools, we observed increased usage over the years in schools with higher composition of students placing below-grade in assessments. Additionally, there is a widening gap in usage, where students placing on-grade use digital tools more than students placing below-grade.