Evaluating educational interventions at scale

Abstract

Education and learning are currently undergoing transformative changes due to the emergence of tablet devices, cloud computing, and abundant online content. These trends present opportunities to transform traditional paper-based textbooks into tablet-based electronic textbooks, and to further enrich the educational experience by augmenting them with relevant supplementary materials. A natural question is whether this educational intervention, namely, enriching textbooks with relevant web articles, images and videos, is effective. It turns out that designing an experiment at scale for this purpose is nontrivial. We report on progress in designing and carrying out such an experiment.