Promethean ActivClassroom Study

Many thanks to Mark Sylvia of Logical Choice Technologies for kindly providing the report that today's journal entry is based on.

Mark has provided a fifty-four page report of a study of the relationship between teacher use of an IWB and student achievement, which reports an average increase in student achievement of 17% when their teacher employed the ActivClassroom in their instruction. The report suggests that this gain in achievement was the result of the following conditions:

• a teacher has 10 years or more of teaching experience
• a teacher has used the technology for two years or more
• a teacher uses the technology between 75 and 80 percent of the time in his or her classroom
• a teacher has high confidence in his or her ability to use the technology
(Marzano, 2009, v)

Promethean ActivClassroom is a product encompassing an interactive whiteboard, the accompanying lesson creation software, and "integrated learner response devices". The Marzano report is available from Promethean's website here.

Obviously some caution must be taken when analysing reports provided by a party with a vested interest (in this case, Promethean's sales volume). That said, the Marzano study appears to have created an optimum environment for testing the impact of the Promethean technologies. The same teachers taught the same unit to two separate classes: one, the treatment group, was taught with the aid of the Promethean technologies, while the second, the control group, was not. (Marzano, 2009, 2)

As noted above, an average of 17% increase in student achievement when utilising Promethean technologies was noted by the report. However, some groups in the study actually recorded a decrease in results - one year seven group reported a discouraging 30% drop in achievement levels. However this particular group gained four students during the course of the study, whose pretest results were not available. (Marzano, 2009, 16) Negative achievement groups such as this one were excluded from the final results, on the justification that students could not possibly exit a class having lost some of their subject knowledge. (Marzano, 2009, 18) Clearly their exclusion from the report's final findings has some effect on the results, however without knowing the mitigating factors (teacher ability/confidence with the technology, possible teacher or student absences, etc) it is difficult to understand the dramatic drop in achievement.

The small number of negative gains aside, the effect of the Promethean technologies on the treatment group classes was overwhelmingly positive. Out of eighty-five classes, sixty-six reported increases in student achievement. Some measure of improvement was reported in nine out of thirteen grade levels (K-12). Regardless of the amount of individual students' improvement in achievement, I would count this as a fairly decisive win for interactive whiteboard technologies.

Note: no examples of assessments of students were provided in the report, so we cannot analyse the achievement gains, for example whether they were testing for lower- or higher-order thinking.

Source:
Marzano, R.J., and Haystead, M. W., "Evaluation Study of the Effects of Promethean ActivClassroom on Student Achievement", Marzano Research Laboratory for Promethean, Ltd., March 2009, http://www.prometheanworld.com/server.php?show=nav.19203

Promethean Interactive Whiteboards, IWB and Classroom Technology, www.prometheanworld.com