New blended learning program nearly doubles math learning

Opponents of education innovation should be worried. The U.S. Department of Education just released one of the largest studies on blended learning ever conducted, and the results are amazing. Students who used a new blended learning program learned nearly twice as much math as they normally would in a year. The two-year study – the largest conducted...

Opponents of education innovation should be worried.

The U.S. Department of Education just released one of the largest studies on blended learning ever conducted, and the results are amazing. Students who used a new blended learning program learned nearly twice as much math as they normally would in a year.

The two-year study – the largest conducted by the department in the last decade – involved more than 17,000 students and 375 teachers from 147 high schools in seven states. The students used Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor to learn Algebra I. This software identifies weaknesses in each individual student’s mastery of mathematical concepts and then customizes questions to focus on areas where students are struggling.

What’s even more impressive is that students with differing levels of initial math ability from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds saw the same gains. So did middle school students, though the effects weren’t statistically significant because of the small sample size.

Supporters of education innovation have always known that the benefits blended learning provides – individualized curriculums, mastery-based education, real-time assessments – would dramatically transform students’ lives.

They can now point to this high-quality, national study to shoot down the arguments of education innovation naysayers.