Research

Digital Promise Makes Improvements to Interactive Ed Research Map

• By Sri Ravipati
• 06/21/17

Digital Promise last year launched an interactive research map to inform education leaders, policymakers, Ed Tech companies, teachers, students and others on the latest research in any given subject, in an effort to make teaching and learning research more accessible. Now, the nonprofit organization has updated the website with new ways for individuals to interact with the research.

First, the data visualization pulls from a database of 100,000-plus peer-reviewed articles from 184 journals published over the last decade. Digital Promise conducted an analysis of the articles and determined more than 120 topics — categorized into the following 11 broad topics:

• Student motivation;
• Instruction and teacher learning;
• Cognition and memory;
• STEM learning practices;
• Autism;
• Literacy
• Special education practices;
• Online learning;
• Identity, behavior and relationships;
• Language learning; and
• Learning math.

For the update, several topics from the old map — including multimodal learning and science teaching — were merged together to form entirely new topics, like STEM learning practices. All of the research map’s topic summary pages have been updated to include new key findings and links to more than 75 resources, according to information from Digital Promise. Users can also navigate these pages easier now using bookmarks.

Additionally, users had expressed wanting to learn how to use the research in the real world, so Digital Promise launched a new video series to illustrate each of the 11 research concepts in practice. In the video “Improving Math Learning with Technology,” for instance, representatives from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International and Teachley share how the latter’s mobile tech helps students receive enough feedback and the right type of feedback (graphical, visual) while learning.

Furthermore, users told Digital Promise they wanted to apply the research to solve specific challenges at their schools and in their classrooms. As the result, the map now includes the “ask a researcher” feature, which allows them to ask experts at the Usable Knowledge project from the Harvard Graduate School of Education more specific questions.

A video overview of the research map can be found below or on YouTube. To learn more about the new updates, visit the Digital Promise blog.