The Effects of Educational Technology Interventions on Literacy in Elementary School A Meta-Analysis

Educational technology is ubiquitous in schools, but there is insufficient information about the effectiveness of interventions that use educational technology to support literacy in elementary school. Given the importance of literacy development in these grades, we conducted a meta-analysis on the effects of educational technology interventions on reading comprehension and writing proficiency as well as the constrained and unconstrained skills that underlie these two literacy constructs. We also conducted analyses to determine whether effects of educational technology interventions differ according to characteristics of the educational interventions or participants in the studies in our corpus. Findings indicate positive effects of educational technology interventions on constrained skills, unconstrained skills, reading comprehension, and writing proficiency though effect sizes differed dramatically across outcomes. Findings also suggest that effects differ according to particular characteristics, providing direction for future research and development of educational technology interventions to support literacy in elementary school.