By Cid Standifer
Broadcast version by Mary Schuermann Kuhlman
Reporting for the Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Center for Investigative Journalism-Ohio News Connection Collaboration

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Educational apps aren't new for the Brimfield family. Kristin Brimfield said she's been using mobile learning games with her son, Logan, since he was two. But while schools were closed where she lives near Canton, she said she relied on them more often to fill Logan's free time.

But finding apps that were fun, functional, and educational wasn't easy.

"Oh my gosh, there's so many" options, she said. "I've probably read dozens of articles rating apps and getting ideas. And then there were some [apps] that I would get suggestions for and think they were going to be really great, and then download them and realize that they're junk."

Game-like educational apps seem like the perfect remote learning tool for 5 and 6 year olds, whose short attention spans and undeveloped reading skills make long Zoom classes and written packets difficult, if not impossible.

And school districts have been using a variety of apps to teach this fall.

"In Ohio you have 611 individual school districts, and it doesn't operate like in some states that are more 'state-driven.' We all have common standards, but you can meet them in different ways," said Sheryl Sheatzley, spokeswoman for the Hudson City School District, about midway between Cleveland and Akron.

She said the school worked for months to find the best apps, because some students are in school full time and some are fully remote.

"It's certainly been a challenge, but we've been getting better and better at it," she said.

The Cleveland Municipal School District, for example, loads up kindergarteners' online learning portals with a host of apps like Imagine Math, BrainPOP Jr. and MobyMax. The curriculum director for the Euclid school district said they use apps like RazPlus and Learning A-Z, and are setting up a process to select apps that can be pre-loaded onto tablets before they're given to students.

Lindsay Ceresnie, who teaches second-grade English-language learners in the suburbs of Washington DC, said her district has added so many apps to students' learning portals since the pandemic began that she hasn't had time to test all of them. They're not as easy for students to use as creators seem to think, she added.

"They love to tell us, 'Oh, the kids can do this independently. It's completely intuitive,'" she said. But "there'll still be something that presents a challenge."

Dozens of studies in the past decade have examined the educational potential of apps, and many have found that high-quality apps yield promising results. But experts say that most apps advertised as educational fall short.

Melissa Callaghan, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, systematically reviewed 171 of the top-rated apps advertised for kids under 5 from both the Google Play and Apple app stores in 2016 and 2017. She found that many of the apps left kids stranded when they got answers wrong or didn't understand instructions, and didn't introduce new material when kids mastered the initial questions.

Callaghan looked at four main criteria when analyzing each app: clarity, feedback, game structure and motion. The ideal app would have clear enough instructions and goals for a young child to use; tell them when and why they got an answer wrong or right; build new skills as kids master lower levels; and help kids build their motor skills as they interact with the app.

Callaghan said one common shortfall was in "scaffolding," where kids learn one skill, and then build on it to learn another, related skill, instead of retreading the same material.

"The overall finding was that preschool apps out there, they're really good at providing clear, simple guidelines at the very beginning ... they're really good at celebrating or providing positive, encouraging feedback," Callaghan said. "Unfortunately, the more scaffolded feedback, the more scaffolded rewards, were not commonly used among preschool apps."

While most apps told children when they'd gotten an answer wrong, they rarely told them why. Only a third of the apps gave kids increasingly difficult questions, and a mere handful asked them to use any physical activities other than drag-and-drop.

Ideally, Callaghan said, kids learn best if an app tells them why they got an answer wrong and helps them find the right answer. As they rack up right answers, an app should reward them not just with trumpets and confetti animations, but by giving them access to more advanced questions. They should also take advantage of cell phones and tablets' sensors, asking them to pinch at the screen, tilt the device, or speak.

"Unfortunately I did not find a perfect app," she said. "It's a pretty mixed bag."

For Callaghan's study, a team of undergraduate and graduate students, plus one professor, downloaded each of the 171 apps and rated them on a list of criteria. Few parents or teachers can commit that level of time and money to finding the right app.

Callaghan shied away from recommending specific apps because the digital marketplace evolves so quickly. However, she had positive things to say about a handful of app producers that seem to pay attention to pedagogical research. She highlighted Duck Duck Moose, owned by the Khan Academy; First 8 Studios, a project from the WGBH Education Foundation; Age of Learning, maker of ABCMouse; and PBS Kids.

Callaghan also recommended parents use resources like Common Sense Media when selecting quality education apps. The website reviews all kinds of media geared toward kids, including educational apps, and curates lists of apps they recommend for various age groups and topics.

Christine Elgersma, a senior editor for Common Sense Media, said that less than half of the apps for preschoolers they've rated over the last decade would be considered high-quality.

"In terms of the real cream of the crop," she said, "it's a small handful in comparison to the literally thousands of apps that are available to parents."

To rate apps, the site relies on educators and former educators who look at a list of criteria, but also rely on their own experience to judge what would work for their students. Where there's solid research on the outcomes of a particular learning app, Elgersma said the site takes them into account. However, she added that few companies invest in meaningful studies, and some of the research advertised by companies doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

In addition to pedagogical criteria like "scaffolding" that Callaghan examined, Common Sense Media takes into account whether games are appropriate for small children. Elgersma said many lose points because they have too many ads, or require in-app purchases for kids to keep playing. But many are simply lacking as educational tools.

"Developers seem to sometimes think if kids are looking at the ABCs or looking at the numbers and tracing them ...that's sort of enough to deem it educational. And while of course those things have some value, there are apps that do it so much better," she said. "They just don't cut the mustard in terms of 2020."

Elgersma said that, for her to strongly recommend an app, it has to offer something that kids couldn't do with just a pen and paper. For example, she pointed to Metamorphabet, an app in which animated letters transform to illustrate words that start with that letter. So, for instance, the letter P morphs into a pinwheel, or an O turns into an ostrich.

Metamorphabet, like many educational apps, isn't free. But other apps recommended by Common Sense Media are, and their site allows users to filter by their price range and phone or tablet operating system. Among the free apps recommended by Elgersma are the Sesame Street app; a storytelling app called Toontastic; a tangram-like game called Relationshapes; and My WonderBooks, which narrates and animates classic children's stories. All are available for both Apple and Android devices.

Ultimately, however, the most important part of learning with apps may not be about the apps themselves. Callaghan said the best way to use an educational app is with someone who can guide kids through questions, explain answers, and discuss what they've learned.

"I know, especially during this pandemic, that parents, caregivers and educators are all especially busy right now. But ideally, it'd be best for children to play these apps with an adult with them, particularly to help make up for whatever is lacking in these apps," she said.

Plymouth State University Professor of Education Patricia Cantor is worried that parents and schools are focusing on apps at the expense of personal interactions and play that are critical to early development.

"In preschool, what we really really want to focus on with children as kind of the beginnings of learning to read are sounds, hearing language, building vocabulary through conversational exchanges with people through their experiences," she said. "That's even more important than drilling them in recognizing letters. So I'm concerned that if preschool age children are in front of a screen, they're not getting the back-and-forth of a conversation. Their exposure to new vocabulary may be very limited."

For example, Cantor said, preparing a meal with a child can expose them to specialized vocabulary, like words for cooking utensils, that are reinforced by their physical interactions with objects. Talking with their caregiver during the activity builds their communication abilities. Using their hands increases their motor skills, which will be critical for learning to write. Even if the entire exchange takes place in a different language, it increases a child's understanding of the richness language can express, which will help them learn English later on.

If parents and caregivers aren't available for one-on-one interactions, Cantor said the best option for remote learning is one-on-one video conversations with teachers. But given young children's limited attention spans and the time demands on teachers, few educators can spend a whole school day conversing with a child on Zoom or FaceTime.

Some daycares can make up the gap in human interaction, but Cantor worries that low-income families don't have access to child care centers with high staff-to-child ratios and trained educators.

"There are so many factors that influence [daycare] quality," she said. "Chances are, if the parents don't have money...you get what you pay for, unfortunately."

Cantor suggested that districts educate parents about the benefits of simply interacting with their kids, even if, for example, the parents don't speak English or can't read. Schools can also help by giving parents ideas for in-person activities away from the computer screen, or even by sending them the recipe for playdough, an inexpensive toy that helps kids develop their hand mobility.

"Obviously, districts are going with these [app] programs because they're cheaper" than intensive online interaction, she said. "But that's a major worry, is that, because they're cheaper, they'll be the first choice, and then there won't be an exploration or experimentation with other ways of doing it."

This story is sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative, composed of 20-plus Northeast Ohio news outlets including Eye on Ohio, which covers the whole state.

This collaboration is funded in part by the Ohio News Media Foundation and The George Gund Foundation, and produced in association with Media in the Public Interest.









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By Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Big Sky Connection reporting for The Hechinger Report-Public News Service Collaboration

Hopeful young entrepreneurs in business schools routinely pitch ideas for startup companies as part of their classroom assignments. But the ones who were doing it at the University of Vermont were still in high school.

It was the inaugural Vermont Pitch Challenge, to which nearly 150 teams from 27 states and seven countries had submitted their entrepreneurial brainstorms. The final five had come to the campus to battle it out for the grand prize: a full-tuition scholarship to UVM.

Their ideas included a website to help previously incarcerated applicants get jobs, a nonprofit to provide mental health support to competitive snowboarders, a medical device to prevent the recurrence of a herniated disk, a company to rent equipment to farmers in St. Croix and an invention to sustainably recharge laptops, phones and tablets.

This competition wasn’t solely about helping the planet or improving medicine, health, employment opportunities or agriculture, however.

It was part of a long-term strategy to increase the number of men at a university where women now outnumber them by nearly two to one.

Painstaking research had suggested that entrepreneurship programs could appeal to high school boys considering going to college. The findings appeared to be right: More boys than girls had entered the pitch contest. And the university hoped that some would eventually enroll.

The approach is among a fast-growing number of efforts to increase the number of men in college, which has been declining steadily.

“We thought that this idea would attract men,” said Jay Jacobs, UVM’s vice provost for enrollment management, who declared himself pleased with the results. “We thought that this idea would attract racial and ethnically diverse students. We thought that this idea would attract what I’ll call geographically diverse students, students not just from Vermont or New England.”

The university needs all of those kinds of recruits. Vermont has the nation’s third-oldest population, by median age, making it harder to find students generally. That’s even before a dramatic decline in the number of 18-year-olds about to hit the rest of the rest of the country starting next year.

“Here, we’ve already felt the impacts of the quote, unquote ‘demographic cliff,’ ” said Jacobs. “We want to make sure that we are in front of any eligible student who is able to pursue their education at the University of Vermont, or in the state of Vermont.”

That particularly includes men. The proportion of applicants to the university who are male has declined from 44 percent in 2010 to 33 percent today, an analysis of federal data shows.

“I definitely do notice that,” said Melinda Wetzel, a junior who was having coffee with a friend in the student center. “In my big lecture halls, I’d say there are more women. And I do have one small class where there is only one guy.”

It isn’t just this university that’s searching for new ways to recruit men.

The number of men enrolled in college nationwide has dropped by more than 157,000, or almost 6 percent, in just the last five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The proportion of college students who are men is now a record-low 41 percent, the U.S. Department of Education says. That’s a complete reversal of the situation 50 years ago, when men outnumbered women in college by about the same extent.

Men are also 7 percentage points more likely than women to drop out, the Clearinghouse reports.

“At conferences, when we’re in rooms together, we all know that this male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” said Jacobs, whose office window overlooks the university’s grand historic main quad.

The ways universities are trying to address this vary widely.

The University of Montana — whose enrollment overall has fallen from nearly 16,000 to about 10,000 in the last 10 years, and 58 percent of whose undergraduates are women — found in focus groups that many of the men it was trying to recruit were interested in the outdoors. So this spring it sent targeted emails to prospective students highlighting its hunting class, forestry program and recreational opportunities.

“Have you ever eaten fresh meat that you harvested yourself?” one of the emails asks. “Apply to UM and develop a closer bond to the landscape than ever before.” Another shows a brawny, bearded man cutting wood. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. “There are few other connections with the natural world better than swinging a sharp axe with the smell of pine in your nose.”

Admitted applicants considering whether or not to enroll are also sent bingo-style checkoff cards with images of hiking, ski and cowboy boots. Other promotional materials include images of country-and-western shows on campus.

Housing deposits from men — which is how the university measures who will be enrolling in the fall, as it doesn’t require enrollment deposits — are up since the campaign began, said Kelly Nolin, director of undergraduate admissions.

“Ultimately all students want to know, ‘Am I going to fit in? Do I belong?’ ” said Nolin.

Among prospective applicants who are increasingly asking those questions, she said, are men from religious conservative families, at a time when universities are accused of being bastions of left-wing cancel culture. “We want them to know they won’t be criticized for their beliefs.”

Further west, the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center has gotten money from the ECMC Foundation to help community colleges enroll and retain more Black and Hispanic men and other men of color. (ECMC is also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

“If, in fact, colleges and universities want to recruit and enroll and ultimately retain and graduate more men, they have to have a strategy,” said Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the center. “It has to be based on input and insights from college men themselves.”

Instead of trying to figure out why so many men forgo college or give up on it after starting, he said, institutions should ask, “Wait a minute, what about the ones who are here and are successful?” Harper said. “What were the factors that enabled their enrollment and their ultimate degree attainment? There’s a lot that we can learn from them that we could scale and adapt to everyone else.”

He and others said they were skeptical of some efforts to enroll more men, such as doubling down on sports by adding more men’s teams in the hope that it will lure more male students, as some colleges are doing.

“They’re not all on sports teams. So that shouldn’t be the only lever that we pull,” said Harper. And even if highlighting hunting might be effective in Montana, “it feels so presumptuous about what really appeals to men. I’m just not sure that institutions understand the full range of young men’s interests, and so they tend to default to things like forestry and outdoor adventures. I’m not sure that would work in California or Maryland.”

Whatever does work, universities are under growing pressure to figure it out. Overall enrollment has declined by 16 percent in the 10 years through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education. Another 11 to 15 percent decline is projected to begin next year.

And there are signs that the problem of attracting men is only likely to get worse.

Of high school boys in Vermont whose parents don’t have four-year degrees, for instance, only 45 percent aspire to go to college themselves, down from 58 percent in 2018, and much lower than the 68 percent of girls who do, a survey found. Even among high school students with at least one parent who has a bachelor’s degree, 87 percent of girls say they want to go to college, compared to 78 percent of boys.

The problem begins early. Girls do better in high school than boys, and are more likely to graduate. In the 37 states that report high school graduation rates by gender, 88 percent of girls finished high school on time, compared to 82 percent of boys, a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution found. Boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, the Pew Research Center found, or go into the trades. Even if they do enroll in colleges, work opportunities lure them away. Men who dropped out of community college are more likely than women to say it was because of other work opportunities, according to a survey by the think tank New America.

That went through John Truslow’s mind when he was deciding whether or not to go to college.

“There was a point where I wasn’t thinking about college” and considered going into the trades or the military, said Truslow, who ultimately decided to major in business at UVM.

Among his male high school classmates who didn’t go to college, said Truslow, who was playing pool in the student center, some couldn’t afford it. “But most of the ones that didn’t directly go to college, it was mostly academic. They just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.”

A third of men compared to a quarter of women said they didn’t go to or finish college because they just didn’t want to, Pew found.

Richard Reeves, who studies this problem, said it may be more a result of having so successfully encouraged women to get degrees than having discouraged men.

“I think actually what’s probably happened is the opposite — that we’ve sent a really strong and positive message to girls and women. But we haven’t had similar messages for boys and men,” said Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

“We’ve now got to do a little bit of self-correction here and say, look, of course we want girls and women to continue to rise in the education system, but we don’t want to leave the boys and men behind.”

Reeves said that, just as male-dominated programs in engineering and business have made extra efforts to recruit women, female-dominated fields such as healthcare and education should now reach out to men.

“That’s another thing that higher education institutions can do, is look at their courses and see where are the gender splits the greatest,” he said. “Rather than thinking the football team is the answer, maybe more men in your nursing school is the answer.”

But the football team could be one of many answers. Among the more subtle efforts to attract men at UVM, the university encourages its students, faculty and staff to wear its colors, green and gold, on Fridays — the days when most prospective applicants are touring the campus. “School spiritedness” is another attribute that research showed appeals particularly to men.

“Coincidentally, Fridays are some of our highest visit volume days, yes,” said Jacobs, smiling.

UVM campus counselors say men who do enroll are less likely to join extracurricular clubs or seek help when they need it. Some men have “this lack of connection,” said Evan Cuttitta, the university’s coordinator of men and masculinities programs. “They have less experience in managing stress and advocating for themselves” and often aren’t as good at “that practice of asking for help.”

So the university has also started a program for Black and Hispanic male students that provides them with peer and professional mentors, summer internships, networking events and priority registration.

All these steps to increase male enrollment appear to be having some effect.

Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, found themselves in Vermont for the entrepreneurship competition. It put the University of Vermont on their radar, they said.

“We haven’t looked at the University of Vermont,” Pierson Parker said. “But after this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it. Because it’s definitely more interesting now.”

Additional reporting by Liam Elder-Connors.


Jon Marcus wrote this article for The Hechinger Report.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.


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Thousands of educators from across the nation will be in Houston starting this weekend for the American Federation of Teachers annual convention.

Before things get underway Monday, more than 100 education professionals will spend some time doing service projects in the Houston area. Sunday, teachers will restore three homes in the city's historic Fourth Ward Freedmen's Town, established by freed Black families in 1865.

Zeph Capo, president of the American Federation of Teachers-Texas, said it is important to preserve history during a time when many people are trying to erase it.

"Students in Houston complete their public-school education and may never know the story of the individuals that established this area within their own city," Capo cautioned. "Because it's not something that is prioritized, it's certainly not something that the state Board of Education has said is important."

In the 1920s and '30s, the Fourth Ward neighborhood was dubbed Houston's Black Wall Street. Educators will also revitalize a community space where a historic church once stood, and will re-rock the prayer labyrinth.

Also on Sunday, educators will host a free clinic to help lawful permanent residents apply for U.S. citizenship. Volunteers will help people fill out the N-400 application and immigration lawyers will be in attendance to answer questions. Capo noted sometimes, educators need to step outside the classroom.

"The purpose of our work, teaching the fundamentals -- the ABCs and the 123s -- but it really is, as a public service is intended to create educated, critical thinking citizens that are able to carry out the running of our country," Capo emphasized.

Capo added Texas educators have held similar citizenship clinics across the state and this weekend's event will be used as training for teachers from other regions.

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Postsecondary enrollment data for 2023 shows community college enrollment increased nationwide by more than 100,000 students, and a large percentage of them were from lower-income neighborhoods.

Tonya DeWitt, director of TRIO programs at Western Nebraska Community College, said the number of their students who qualify for the federally funded program designed to help students with economic and other challenges has increased.

TRIO students must be a first-generation college student, have a household income not exceeding 150% of the federal poverty guideline or have a disability. Participants receive academic assistance, and DeWitt pointed out many benefit from the Growth Mindset program.

"Instead of, 'I can't do it,' 'Well, you can't do it right now, sure, but you can,'" DeWitt explained, as an example of thought exercises to help students build a positive mindset. "And all those negative, immediate, 'Oh well, no, I can't do nursing.' 'Well, why is that?' 'I just can't?' 'Well, that's not true, so let's get to the bottom of it. Let's see what it is that's keeping you from being able to be successful.'"

DeWitt noted the academic supports include in-person tutoring, 24/7 virtual tutoring, study guides and online programs assisting with writing and research. She added the nursing program is very popular with TRIO students but interest in the college's offerings in the trades is also growing.

DeWitt emphasized the ability to access tutoring any hour of the day or night, including holidays, is huge for some of their TRIO students.

"We make sure that our students who are on the road with sports can access it while on the road, while they're doing their homework on the bus," DeWitt observed. "We have the ones that are single parents. In the middle of the night, that's when they're doing their homework."

Roughly 10% of the school's TRIO students are single parents and eligible for their Single Parents in Network, or SPiN program. It helps them with personal, academic and career issues. They can also access a "necessities" pantry in addition to the college's food pantry.

"Detergent or cleaning supplies for the house to make sure that it's a clean place for their children. We offer diapers and baby stuff, and we give backpacks to their kids so they can go to school," DeWitt outlined. "We offer some educational supplies for all students, but also others for our SPiN participants."

The Institute for Women's Policy Research reported a large percentage of college students who are parents face "enormous barriers to academic success," many of them economic.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.


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