June 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR
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What Does SBR Mean for Education Technology?
For these and other reasons, SBR implementation and impact will vary widely over time, as well as by district, state, federal program and educational issue. As such, SBR will not trump these other factors, but will simply add information to the increasingly complex equation used by educators to make instructional and management decisions, meet educational goals, and address NCLB requirements.
Technology's SBR Challenges
Given that SBR is now part of the education technology landscape - both in terms of federal requirements and educator needs - it is important to look at the challenges inherent in such demands on educational products, programs, policies and practices. Discussed below are many of the challenges faced by educational research in general, along with the particular dilemma SBR poses for technology-based products and practices.
Resources. Demands for more and more rigorous research must be accompanied by more resources - human, financial, etc. - to adequately address new research goals and SBR requirements. However, right now neither the research community nor the educational marketplace is positioned to quickly adapt to these new resource requirements. In addition, will schools using federal funds to implement their own programs or develop their own technologies have the resources to conduct their own necessary SBR?
For the moment, most developers and publishers will prioritize and conduct SBR for mission-critical products (e.g., reading instructional software typically purchased by districts with Title I funds) that will likely have the highest expectations for research backing. While NCLB makes no differentiation, it is not realistic that all products would be subject to identically stringent SBR standards, with scrutiny directly proportional to cost and anticipated educational impact.
However, it is likely that educators may choose to ask for evidence of effectiveness for supplemental purchases, either on their own or in an effort to comply with their interpretation of an NCLB SBR provision. This will likely have repercussions on product prices and the ability of some publishers to compete, given the cost burdens of such research. This may be especially true in technology publishing, where the margins are very slim and most publishers, particularly small ones, cannot absorb increased development costs.
Whether or not educators agree to a trade-off between cost increases/product fallout and evidenced-backed products remains to be seen, and will depend very much on whether SBR requirements result in better products on the market. Also unclear is whether educators will respond in kind by evaluating their own "homegrown" technology efforts. If educational practice is greatly improved through the application of SBR, a very different educational marketplace may emerge in the next decade.
Time. From initial planning to final reporting, evaluation studies can take considerable time to complete and release. Even evaluation studies lasting just one semester in the classroom can take more than a year. And most researchers agree that it often takes three years or more to complete a satisfactory number of quality effectiveness studies. The problem arises when this research timeline is juxtaposed with the timeline for technology development, which is built on the speedier principle of innovation. At such a speed, many technology products are likely to be obsolete (at least in their original version) before research on them is available.
