The path to efficacy – our pursuit to deliver measurable learner outcomes – takes an important step forward today as we invite the education community to help us create the report that we’ll use to communicate our findings. The report, which we’ll produce every year starting in 2018, will provide absolute transparency on the efficaciousness of our products and services; or in other words, the degree to which our products measurably impact someone’s life. Just as every year our financial accounts tell our shareholders how we’ve fared against our commercial KPIs, this new report will tell our audience – teachers, students, professionals, parents – the one thing theyreally care about; are we helping them make progress in their lives through learning? It’s a complex question educators often ask, but many struggle to answer. Compare this to other data-rich sectors. Do doctors prescribe medication without knowing about the drug? Would a farmer put a particular fertilizer on his crops without knowing the relationship between how much it costs, and how likely it’ll improve the yield? Yet in education circles, we often only tell half the story – the money spent, the teachers trained, the technology installed – without asking what good it actually did. We fall for the McNamara fallacy by measuring the measurable instead of measuring the important. We focus on the inputs, not on the outcomes. Instead we need to relate our efforts to the questions that learners want answers to, like is he a better reader than before, can she now think more critically about a complex task, or will I become qualified for that promotion? We don’t anticipate that being able to provide these sorts of assurances to learners will be easy. If it were, we’d have already done it. That’s why it’s a challenge we think is best shared. Today’s invitation for experts to join us in this challenge is an important step forward – for us as a company and for the education community as a whole. We cannot possibly begin to build a global consensus about the sort of learning that works well, if we haven’t first agreed what we need to measure, how to measure it, and how to communicate what we discover.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:29:54 +0000
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