Reviewing ed tech’s impact on literacy: It’s a win!

By Ashley Grant, Johns Hopkins University

Educational technology tools and programs proliferate the elementary classrooms where children are learning to read, but the evidence supporting these tools lags behind their implementation. Silverman and Colleagues collected and reviewed the results from 119 studies that examined the impact of educational technology interventions on literacy outcomes between 2010 and 2023.

The study found medium to large positive impacts of educational technology on literacy across four outcome domains: decoding (ES = + 0.33), language comprehension (ES = +0.30), reading comprehension (ES = +0.23), and writing proficiency (ES = +0.81). Looking closer at these impacts, effects were smaller on standardized outcome measures (such as state tests), compared to researcher-created measures (for more on the topic of researcher-created vs. standardized outcome measures, read related BEiB summaries here and here). Most of the analysis of which intervention and design features mattered was inconclusive, but the authors did find constructivist approaches were more beneficial for language comprehension. One notable limitation of the research was the inclusion of only peer-reviewed studies (including dissertations) – which may have led to more positive results than is observed in studies overall given the bias in publishing for both positive and significant findings.