Promethean buys what it needs to be credible...

[Michael Scott]

Robert Marzano recently released his preliminary report on the effectiveness of Promethean's classroom products. Not surprisingly, Marzano "meta analyzed" some promising outcomes from the use of Promethean's classroom technologies. Let me state right off the bat that I think interactive classroom technologies have great potential to improve classroom instruction. Our division is predominantly an Interwrite/Einstruction shop and we have oodles of school pads. We also have begun to acquire some SMART boards. ( If only training was as easy as buying stuff... but I digress.)


Being a big fan of interactive classroom technologies does not make me a big fan of corporate sponsored research. Coming from a purely scientific background I just can't buy into the objectivity of research done in the manner described in this publication. Aside for the exchange of money for published results, there are few other troublesome aspects of the research. First, no peer review. At least that's what I see. Marzano runs his own lab and the research seems to be published directly from his organization. There's no apparent review of the research from any independent or authoritative source. Pretty much an in house deal and that always makes results circumspect. Second, he flat out calls his design "quasi-experimental"... which means he has no way to set decent controls so he just uses currently existing groups and classifies them as he sees fit. To really get to an unbiased result, he would have to have no idea where the data was coming from. I think he could have easily arranged to have some "blindness" in the study. Finally, Marzano is a big meta analysis guy. He likes to use this technique to determine effect sizes from various treatments. It's somewhat controversial, because he does get to dictate and self select some of the statistical parameters. The frequent outcome of his number reporting are gross misrepresentations of effectiveness. For instance, he'll report a percentile gain of 21%. He knows what he means by that, but when I see his results presented at meetings, the speaker usually implies that the average individual increased performance by 21%. That isn't so at all. It's an effect size measure in with 21% of the individuals in a group showed some performance increase. It says nothing about the increase in performance of any specific individual.


I suppose I should be dragging this information to my instructional colleagues and making a case for the purchase of more interactive classroom technology. I can't do it with this research though. I'll just stick with the "look how cool this is argument" My long experience of vendors touting their products doesn't match with the same long history of hit or miss implementation. I'm going to read this whole paper very carefully. Stay tuned and let me know what you think.


http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?I=58362

Or the complete report here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14646326/Marzano-Preliminary-Report-on-ActivClassroom

[Cynthia Cornwell]

I would agree that Marzano's results are often misinterpreted, but that aside, he does look at more data than most researchers. Regarding the wow factory of interactive whiteboards, anything that can tap into learning styles of today's students, and they do, is all good. Students who don't usually participate in group discussions are at a minimum paying attention to the board and the discussion.