Jul 23, 2009

Pursuing an Academic Edge at Home

Kimberly Kauer was worried about her 6-year-old daughter’s math skills. Her school doesn’t assign homework, and Ms. Kauer wasn’t sure which math concepts her daughter fully understood.

To quell her fears, Ms. Kauer started her daughter on an online educational program for young children called DreamBox Learning. DreamBox uses interactive games to teach math and analyzes users’ progress as they complete lessons.

“It was really well-geared to her age,” says Ms. Kauer, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom in Emerald Hills, Calif. “They really tailored their questions to meet her needs.” After monitoring her daughter’s progress, Ms. Kauer concluded that her daughter was up to par for her age.

DreamBox is one of a number of companies, with names like SmartyCard, Brightstorm and Grockit, that are pitching a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students’ education at home. The programs, which parents pay for by subscription, target learners from kindergartners to high-school seniors. The companies hope their interactive programs will draw students wanting to get ahead at a lower cost than hiring a professional tutor.

Tech companies began wooing consumers with educational products about a decade ago, but often with little success. Many of the early products had primitive technology. Today they offer such features as video and tools that allow collaboration. And children, familiar with sites like Webkinz and MySpace, are becoming more proficient at using the Web at younger ages.

The latest educational programs are generally created by teams of accredited teachers and often reviewed further by advisory teams that may include college professors of education. Still, while some earlier online programs have proved effective at raising children’s comprehension of academic subjects, the latest sites haven’t been extensively studied.

A Free Trial

Many of the programs offer feedback on a child’s progress, so parents can judge its usefulness for themselves. In choosing an educational program, “I’m more inclined to go with something that is aligned with state and national standards,” says Leticia Barr, a technology magnet coordinator and teacher for an elementary school in Maryland’s Montgomery County. She recommends starting with a free trial of the program. Parents should watch how their child interacts with the program to get a sense of whether it is appropriate.

DreamBox focuses on delivering individualized math instruction. As learners finish their lessons, answers are analyzed taking into account a problem’s difficulty, how quickly a question was answered, lesson pacing and other factors. Lessons are customized based on the user’s answers. DreamBox, founded this year, has mainly focused on the home market, but says it now is also selling to schools. Subscriptions for home users are $59.95 for six months.

Playing for Points

SmartyCard, launched in March, involves children in educational games to learn about math, social studies, writing and other subjects. Parents purchase SmartyCards, which hold points that are unlocked when a child successfully completes a lesson. Kids can use the points to play Webkinz, Club Penguin and other sites, or to redeem for goods like Nintendo Wii games and DVDs. The company says the site, launched in March, has 200,000 registered users.

Some sites focus on getting students ready for tests like the SAT. At Grockit, students can take practice tests while collaborating online with other users, typically in groups of five. After each question, users can discuss via an internal instant-messaging system how they arrived at their answers. Another site, Brightstorm, also offers courses for students in advanced placement courses.

Among other sites, GoGo Lingo uses animation, humor and casual game play to teach young children basic Spanish nouns, adjectives and verbs, but doesn’t focus on teaching grammar. The site, aimed at 3- to 7-year-olds, plans to add other languages in the future.

And Indian Math Online is a Web-based math program for K-12 students that is based on the national academic standards of India. A team of teachers based in India creates the content for the site.

The online educational industry has been getting a big boost from venture capital firms. Last year, about $1 billion was invested in learning technology companies, according to Ambient Insight, a market research firm focusing on education and technology. That’s up from $850.6 million invested in 2007.

Blended Instruction

Recent research suggests online instruction can be effective for older students. The Department of Education examined 46 studies conducted between 1996 and July 2008 that compared online classes, mostly at the college level, with traditional courses. It found that blended instruction, which combines online and face-to-face instruction, is more effective than pure face-to-face teaching. Researchers attributed the results in part to differing curriculums and the greater amount of time students spent on the online courses.

Still, the studies didn’t analyze online educational tools for home use. Julie Evans, chief executive of Project Tomorrow, an educational research group, says online instruction is limited by a lack of a suitable yardstick for measuring its effectiveness. Students in a traditional classroom are evaluated through standardized tests, she says. But this is a poor way to measure the effectiveness of Web-based education, partly because standardized tests can’t assess how well students learn from each other through collaboration, Ms. Evans says. “I don’t think we have seen good metrics to evaluate that true collaborative learning environment” of the Web, she says.

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