A conversation with science of learning researcher, Dr Nidhi Sachdeva, challenges what equity really requires in classrooms.
Key takeaways
- True equity means every student reaching the same outcomes on the same timeline, with high expectations held for all.
- Early intervention beats later remediation, giving students the strongest chance to close gaps before they widen.
- Explicit instruction is one of the most powerful equity tools available for advancing equity, and it is consistently underused.
- ‘Personalised’ EdTech is not automatically equitable. The tool should follow the problem, not the other way around.
- Focusing on what students retain, not just how engaged they seem, leads to better instructional decisions
For years, ‘equity’ in secondary schools has quietly come to mean accommodation: extra time, simplified tasks, scaffolds that never come off. This approach feels compassionate, however, large-scale studies involving thousands of students consistently show that high expectations paired with structured instruction, not reduced demands, produce the greatest gains for disadvantaged learners.
Dr Nidhi Sachdeva, a science of learning researcher at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and Chair of ResearchED Canada, makes the point clearly: lowering the bar is not equity. Genuine equity means that every student reaches the final outcomes, and reaches them on time. Not eventually, and not ‘in their own time’, but alongside their peers, before the gap has a chance to compound into something much harder to close.
That distinction matters more than it might first appear. It reframes equity as a question of instructional design, rather than a question of adjusted expectations, and that reframing has direct implications for how secondary schools choose, evaluate, and use EdTech.
The Challenge with Treating Equity as a Feature
EdTech has recently delivered real gains in accessibility, including:
- Text-to-speech tools
- Adjustable pacing
- Formative assessment at scale
Sachdeva identifies a pattern that many school leaders will recognise. Rather than starting with a clearly defined instructional problem, many schools select a tool first and then construct an equity rationale around it.
“What ends up happening is that we have an EdTech tool, and then we try to fit it in. And then [we] say, ‘Hey, this is going to allow us to have more equitable outcomes because we’re giving more accessibility.’ But in reality, the problem was that long-term learning didn’t happen.” — Dr Nidhi Sachdeva
Differentiation and personalised learning are among the most heavily marketed capabilities in the EdTech sector, yet the evidence on whether these features reliably close achievement gaps is far less settled than vendor claims typically suggest. What the research does consistently show is that structured, explicit instruction, with practice embedded throughout rather than added at the end, produces the strongest gains for students who are furthest behind.
Dr Nidhi Sachdeva references multiple studies to support this; analyses by Baker, Gersten and Lee (2002), and Kroesbergen and colleagues (2004), drawing on thousands of students across multiple contexts, each found that explicit instruction conditions produced the greatest reductions in achievement gaps, particularly for students starting from a point of disadvantage.
For school leaders evaluating new tools, Sachdeva offers a pointed reframe: begin with the learning problem, rather than the platform.
“Really understanding what’s the problem we’re trying to solve is important,” she notes. “We want to understand that students are struggling with a particular thing, and then ask whether there is an EdTech tool or platform we can use…The right EdTech tool will follow.”
On the question of engagement specifically, Sachdeva is direct: “Engagement could be, in many cases, a false proxy for learning.”
A tool that generates high interaction rates but does not produce durable changes in what students know and can do is not closing an equity gap.
“We have to be really cautious that we aren’t celebrating engagement all the time. We have to celebrate learning. Learning is the long-term change we’re looking for: stable change in long-term memory, right?”
From Instructional Intent to Classroom Reality
Positioning EdTech as a response to a clearly defined instructional problem, rather than as the starting point, is a principle that is easier to articulate than it is to act on. The sequencing matters because reversing it, as the evidence suggests many schools do, tends to produce tools in search of problems, rather than solutions to them. Grounding technology decisions in the cognitive science of how students actually learn, and only then asking which tools best support that, is the direction Sachdeva’s research consistently points toward.
In practice, however, this requires navigating a more complex reality. Sachdeva is candid about the human dimension of this challenge. Many teachers have been trained in, and have built professional identities around, approaches that the research landscape has shifted beneath, and redirecting practice requires considerably more than circulating a summary of findings.
“We have to bring those conversations to the table and have open discussions,” she notes, “but really with kindness, because quite quickly it could turn into shaming, naming, mocking, and we’re not going to achieve much through that.”
Her own approach is to look for points of alignment rather than relitigating the past.
“Let’s start small,” she explains. “The small wins will actually lead to some bigger ones.”
It is a framing that will resonate with many school leaders who understand that sustainable change in complex organisations tends to be incremental, and that trust between leadership and teaching staff is not built through mandates. The goal, as Sachdeva sees it, is to build genuine shared understanding of what learning actually requires before the conversation moves to which tools and approaches best support it.
That shared understanding, Sachdeva argues, is more generative than it might initially appear. Drawing on the work of cognitive psychologist Paul Kirschner, she describes learning as “a stable change in one’s long-term memory,” and suggests that once educators internalise that definition, both instructional decisions and technology choices become more straightforward to evaluate. It is a definition that invites reflection rather than prescription: for school leaders thinking about equity, it opens up useful questions about whether current practice, in terms of tools and instructional approach, is oriented toward that kind of durable, lasting change for the students who need it most.
Hear the full conversation:
This article draws on Episode 1 of Well-MeasurED, Education Perfect’s interview series exploring what genuinely works in education and EdTech with industry leaders and researchers.
Watch or listen to Dr Jill McGuire and James Santure’s conversation with Dr Nidhi Sachdeva, “Equity, EdTech and the Science of Learning“, to hear the research in her own words.
