Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) directed the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and by extension, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), to produce a report about the educational impact of access to digital learning resources outside of the classroom. While working on this report, NCES identified a general lack of basic information in NCES studies as well as those conducted by other research organizations about how teachers developed class assignments in relation to what they knew about their students’ abilities to access the internet outside of school. In other words, NCES could not answer questions such as, “Are teachers aware of how easily their students can access the internet once they leave school?” or, “Do teachers adjust homework assignments knowing that some students have difficulty accessing the internet once they leave for the day?”

NCES has conducted a wide range of studies that include data collection from teachers. Center staff could have worked to integrate some items about out-of-school tech access into some or all of these collection efforts. However, given the production cycles of extant NCES collections and space limitations in these collections, NCES determined that it would be more efficient to develop a new survey through its Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) on this topic. The FRSS is designed to evaluate new topics for suitability for survey-based data collections, and then to develop, field, and release data on these topics very quickly. Should the collection effort prove successful, components from the FRSS study will then be incorporated into the more regularly scheduled data collections fielded by NCES. Experts working on NCES’s new Ed Tech Equity Initiative, content and policy experts within the U.S. Department of Education, and teachers contributed to the development of the content of the survey, as well as the April 2018 report, “Student Access to Digital Learning Resources Outside of the Classroom.” This presentation will provide the audience with an overview of content that was developed for field testing of the FRSS study, the data released from the collection, as well as any challenges NCES faced in developing the survey.