In her article “Educational apps are worth billions. We need to make sure they work,” researcher Natalie I. Kucirkova presents a compelling case for closer collaboration between developers, researchers, and educators in the design of educational technology.

Her argument is timely. Educational apps now represent a multi-billion-dollar industry, and they hold enormous promise. Technology can give students access to information and learning experiences that might otherwise be out of reach. It can also provide new ways for students to interact with ideas and practice emerging skills.

But as Kucirkova points out, many apps currently on the market simply teach children to play manipulative games rather than meaningfully support learning.

After many years of working with struggling learners, I have seen repeatedly that academic struggle rarely has a single cause. The reasons students struggle with reading, writing, or mathematics are often complex, overlapping, and highly individualized.

Traditional forms of reductive testing alone may not provide the kind of research data needed to guide the development of truly effective educational technology. Nor does simply applying gaming concepts to education guarantee that students will acquire the foundational skills required for literacy and numeracy.

Measuring outcomes in education is also notoriously difficult. Learning to read, for example, depends on many variables—and those variables are not the same for every learner. They can be influenced by:

• socioeconomic conditions
• cultural and linguistic differences
• emotional and motivational factors
• access to resources
• type and quality of instruction

With so many factors interacting, determining the true efficacy of an educational app becomes a challenging task. How we measure effectiveness across this wide range of differences is very much an open question—and an important one.

Kucirkova suggests that motivation to read may be one of the most meaningful indicators of an app’s value. In other words, the key question may not simply be whether an app improves test scores, but whether it encourages a child to choose to read more often.

This insight resonates deeply with my own experience. At CogniLens, creating the motivation to read is central to the app’s value. Our goal is to support the reading process in a way that makes the experience easier, more fluent, and more enjoyable—so readers are more willing to engage with text again and again.

When reading becomes less effortful and more rewarding, something important happens: students begin to seek out reading rather than avoid it.

And that shift—from resistance to engagement—may be the most powerful learning outcome of all.