Survey Says! Pear Deck Effectively Supports Great Teaching

At Pear Deck, our mission has always been to help teachers deliver powerful learning moments to every student, every day. As classrooms around the country close and we face the reality of weeks of social distancing, the work of creating a joyful, compassionate, collaborative learning culture is more important and more challenging.

We’re in the midst of an incredible shift in the way technology shapes education. We’ve been working with thousands of  administrators and educators, asking them how this shift is affecting what they do and how we can help them be successful. The number one thing we’ve heard is that teachers are looking for simple tools that can make a big impact on instruction. It has been gratifying to see educators around the world recommend Pear Deck as an essential tool for remote learning.

The design of Pear Deck is rooted in evidence-based research on techniques that have a positive effect on student learning. We want to help schools leverage technology to level the playing field and ensure that as many students as possible benefit from a strong relationship with their teacher and classroom community, be it in-person or remote.

It’s one thing to say, “This is what Pear Deck does.” It’s more important that we demonstrate the utility of our tools. We recently completed an efficacy survey with researchers at the University of Iowa Center for Evaluation and Assessment. Over 1,300 educators responded to a series of questions about their perceptions of and experiences with Pear Deck.

Let’s break these results down:  

Pear Deck is effective for teaching students of all ages and across subject areas.

Pear Deck is designed to be content and age agnostic. Pear Deck is being used from kindergarten through graduate school and in every subject from math to music. Great teaching has certain constants (think: students thrive when they feel connected and classrooms are enriched when diverse voices can be heard). These constants are important regardless of subject matter, age, or ability of the learner and can be supported with simple, effective teaching tools.

Pear Deck supports student learning.

Over 90% of educators agreed that Pear Deck supports learners in the following ways: expressing understanding, engaging them (more than other activities), facilitating a positive and joyful classroom, and promoting peer communication.

We all know that learning happens when students are meaningfully engaged, presented with great content, and feeling supported and challenged by their learning community. While digital tools make it possible for each of us to learn in a way that suits our individual needs, Pear Deck brings individuals together in focused conversation. We all know that devices can function as agents of distraction; Pear Deck helps educators leverage devices as tools for deeper engagement.

Pear Deck supports great teaching.

Teaching is incredibly hard. Educational software can't just be "one more thing" for teachers to do, and being fun isn't the same as being effective. When teachers use Pear Deck, we want to be sure that it aids them in delivering quality instruction. Over 95% of educators agreed that Pear Deck helps them deliver powerful learning moments to every student every day with features and tools that help them engage every student and manage class discussions.

Teachers use Pear Deck to support best practices.

It’s one thing for teachers to agree that Pear Deck supports great teaching, but we also wanted to know if teachers actually use it in those ways. As part of the survey, teachers told us their favorite ways to use Pear Deck are in service of best practices. Over 80% of teachers agreed that Pear Deck supports the following best practices: promoting critical thinking, using formative assessment to adapt instruction, promoting metacognition, and allowing adequate processing time.  

What excites us about all these findings is that they hold true for both in-person and remote instruction. Furthermore, these outcomes can be found in both synchronous and asynchronous learning environments using Pear Deck. Even as the education landscape has transformed before our eyes, the power of Pear Deck as an instructional tool remains the same, as does our mission. Pear Deck is here to help you create powerful learning moments for every student, every day—whether you’re in the front of the classroom or behind your screen.

Learn more about Pear Deck’s approach to efficacy or discover resources for remote learning.

Illustration by Kate Moore

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