Education Week on the Web and Milken Exchange on Education Technology. "Technology Counts '98." October 1, 1998.

• http://www.edweek.org/sreports/tc/

Technology Counts '98 is a report that addresses the issue of technology's effectiveness in several ways:

• It examines technology's impact on test scores and school climate through an analysis of how students scores on the mathematics exam from the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress. This study, which was conducted by Harold Wenglinsky of the Educational Testing Service and commissioned by Education Week, claims that computers can raise student achievement and improve a school's climate, but "they have to be placed in the right hands and used in the right ways."
• Ten case studies present schools that are using ICTs to foster goals of the education reform movement. Each case study provides highlights of related research, recommendations and a list of additional resources.
• Nine policies are presented for states to follow and accompanied by summaries of state activities in each area.
• National and state data on technology access, capacity, and use is also included.

Some important points from the introduction, written by Andrew Trotter:

• "The obligation is for educators, practitioners, educational policymakers to think about what it is they're after," [Stanford University professor Larry] Cuban says. "Only with clear goals can educators be intelligent about how much they want to spend for what purpose, and under what conditions."
• Research at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, at the University of California, Los Angeles found that students in classes with many computers do more writing than students in low-tech classes. This does not automatically translate into better writing, says CRESST's associated director, Joan L. Herman. "They're not going to write better until teachers learn to teach writing better or learn to assess writing better so they give children targeted feedback. Practice alone in the absence of feedback is not going to move kids ahead."
• It can be difficult to start small with education technology, since setting up the foundational equipment can be quite expensive. "Technology requires a substantial minimum investment to even be on the table," [Christopher J. Dede, professor of education and information technology at George Mason University] says. "The money has to be spent on rewiring of the schools, the initial purchase of the wiring and software—money that's needed for a lot of other things. It is a cruel dilemma."
• "To improve the quality of research, experts agree there should be more longitudinal studies that chart the progress of the same students over several years. In addition, the studies should focus on fewer technologies, undergo tighter controls, involve larger numbers of subjects, and rely less on subjects' self-reporting and more on trained observers."
• Many experts contend that there should be more longitudinal studies.
• To make findings more accessible to practitioners and policymakers, research reports should include more specific details about schools than they do now. "Researchers typically omit information—such as a project's costs and the level of teacher training—of immense value to anyone who would replicate the project or even compare the results of different studies, says Elliot Soloway, a computer scientist and educational software developer at the University of Michigan. Soloway and several colleagues have developed a format, tied to what they call "convergent analysis," for presenting research that they hope will be widely adopted. Barbara Means, researcher at SRI International also argues that there should be more consistency across studies and "the kind of contextual information about the settings that would allow us to aggregate across studies."

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