CAREER: Investigations of Educational Technology to Safeguard Children’s Privacy

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Schools have increasingly adopted educational technologies to support learning, monitor student engagement, and track and predict academic performance. These educational technologies may negatively impact schoolchildren if student data are used to create records that lead to unfair discrimination or unconsented use by commercial entities. Many educational technologies used or sponsored by schools are not well regulated. To safeguard children’s privacy, this project investigates the data that educational technologies are gathering on schoolchildren, how and why those data are being used, and by whom they are used. The investigations examine educational technologies under remote, hybrid, and in-person learning conditions. This project will lead to better understanding by parents, children, and teachers of the impact of educational technologies on children’s privacy and how to curb undesirable data collection and better maintain online privacy. This project is creating after-school learning activities for middle school girls, summer programs for college readiness, and parent-focused seminars on the topic of online privacy. It is also creating privacy-related educational resources for college students and providing empirical evidence to inform the regulation of educational technologies.This project studies the privacy effects of educational technologies on children in grades 3–7. The studies are being carried out in two of the largest public school districts in the US, Chicago and Houston. The investigations include qualitative data collection of parents’ and children’s experiences with educational technologies, and qualitative studies of teachers’ views on educational technologies and data collection practices. The project will inform a taxonomy of the most commonly used educational technologies in the largest US school districts and their impact on schoolchildren’s privacy. The project also includes co-design and evaluation of ways to help parents, children, and teachers better manage educational technologies’ data collection for safeguarding schoolchildren’s privacy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.