AppleInsider Staff
On the heels of Apple's e-textbook announcement in New York City this week, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the results of its "HMC Fuse: Algebra I" pilot program at Ameila Earhart Middle School in California's Riverside Unified School District. The Algebra I digital textbook is touted as the world's first full-curriculum algebra application developed exclusively for Apple's iPad.
In its test run, the "HMH Fuse" application helped more than 78 percent of students score "Proficient" or "Advanced" on the spring 2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks.
"By engineering a comprehensive platform that combines the best learning material with technology that embraces students' strengths and addresses their weaknesses, we've gone far beyond the capabilities of an e-book to turn a one-way math lesson into an engaging, interactive, supportive learning experience," said Bethlam Forsa, executive vice president of Global Content and Product Development at HMH. "With HMH Fuse, teachers can assess student progress in real time and tailor instruction as needed.â€
The first pilot program took place during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 school year, when students using "HMH Fuse" were said to have scored an average of 10 points higher than their peers. But that number jumped even higher for the California Standards Test in spring 2011, when "HMH Fuse" students scored about 20 percent higher than students who used traditional textbooks.
Earhart math teachers Dan Sbur and Jackie Davis were among the first to use the new digital tool on Apple's iPad. Both said they were encouraged by the initial run and the positive effect it had on students' scores.
"Students' interaction with the device was more personal," Earhart Principal Coleman Kells said. "You could tell the students were more engaged. Using the iPad was more normal, more understandable for them."
A white paper on the HMH Fuse Pilot Program is available for download from the publisher. Other schools and students can download the "HMH Fuse Shell" applications available for free on the iPad App Store, with curriculums available as in-app purchases within the applications.
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72 Comments
So what this study indicates to me is, first, the iPad is a useful teaching tool and second, we need better teachers. Of course everyone knew the latter, everyone except the teacher's unions anyway.
-kpluck
Intriguing findings. Hopefully someone will evaluate this using a proper impact assessment design (multi-level random assignment). There are too many confounds to get overly excited about these results.
...and second, we need better teachers.
It might not be better teachers, it might just be more teachers. Doubling the capacity of a class room makes it harder to control the focus which allows for less time to teach, and then for the children that need additional instruction (for various reasons) you either have to limit their time or see a small percentage of them which may happen as a student might get discouraged if they have to wait an extra long time for additional instruction. Interactive textbooks aren't designed to replace, just assist.
While I would love to think that using the iPad and digital textbooks were going to solve our problems, I am still very skeptical. The 20% increase seen in this study may well be real, but it doesn?t mean that it will carry over into every day. Pilot programs nearly always show an improvement because they use teachers who are committed to the new approach, and their enthusiasm helps motivate the students. When the same approach is then mandated for all teachers, most of whom have no interest in using a new method, the results are usually dismal. This has been true for math since at least the ?New Math? of the 60s, as well as for various reading methods.
I do think the use of electronic texts will have some advantages, but I doubt if they will result in significant improvement in student performance.
"Students' math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks" = BS!