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A new study by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, finds that students’ perceptions of their teachers correlate with the teachers’ value-added scores; in other words, “students seem to know effective teaching when they experience it.” The correlation is stronger for mathematics than for ELA; this is one of many discrepancies between math and ELA in the study. According to the authors, “outside the early elementary grades when students are first learning to read, teachers may have limited impacts on general reading comprehension.” This peculiar observation should raise questions about curriculum, but curriculum does not come up in the report.

When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own.

And even with the most modern device in hand, students still need the basics of a solid curriculum and skilled teachers. “There’s a saying that the music is not in the piano and, in the same way, the learning is not in the device,’’ said Mark Warschauer, an education and informatics professor at the University of California-Irvine whose specialties include research on the intersection of technology and education.

“I think one of the real key questions that will be answered over the next several years is what sort of things work best in print for students and what sort of things work best digitally,’’ Diskey said. “I think we’re on the cusp of a whole new area of research and comprehension about what digital learning means.’’