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House Authorizes National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund
Last week, the House authorized funding for a new learning center dedicated to researching and developing innovative digital learning and information technologies for the nation’s education system. The Higher Education authorization bill includes a provision to create the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund which will provide public funding for research in educational technology. Private investment has been difficult to muster because educational standards differ from state to state, making it difficult to market educational software. The bill now moves to conference in the Senate where it seems to have strong support among key Senators.
Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, which supported the inititative, argues in a Science Progress article posted today that public investment in developing educational software could redefine both the way students learn new skills and the way tests assess those skills. According to Kelly, the antiquated testing methods mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act fail to provide the information needed to assess the progress of children in the public school system. His proposal? Video games, which can hold a student’s attention for hours, can present challenging goals that continuously test aptitude, and can assess newly acquired skills interactively in real time. Unfortunately, the market for educational technology is stagnant because universities and schools are unlikely to bet on innovative, untested approaches to educational learning technologies, and past failures of the educational software market have many investors wary about pouring money into costly development. Either the government can fund research on educational technology, he argues, or we can “continue to fool ourselves that our education system can be fixed with ad hoc testing standards.”
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