Race to the Tablet? The Impact of a Personalized Tablet Educational Program

Abstract The presence of tablets and laptops in schools has burgeoned in recent years, with $4.9 billion spent on over 10.8 million devices in 2015. Despite the large and increasingly prevalent monetary and time investments in education technology, little causal evidence of its effectiveness exists. I estimate the effect of a Math and English Language Arts tablet educational program that supplements core instruction using a randomized controlled trial in a Boston charter middle school. I find that the personalized learning technology can substantially increase end-of-year test scores by 0.202 standard deviation in Math, but find no effects for the summative English exam. For the quarterly formative exams, I find positive, but insignificant effects for Math and marginally significant effects for English. This paper demonstrates the potential of technology to enhance student learning in Math and could serve as a cheaper alternative to high-intensity tutoring for school districts without funding or labor supply for extensive tutoring programs.