New Tool to Evaluate Digital Curriculum Features for Teaching and Learning Success

Digital features in curricula can empower teachers and engage students, bridging the gap between product potential and everyday practice to improve learning outcomes.

As district leaders in California prepare to adopt a new math curriculum, their options include numerous high-quality programs. However, a key challenge for districts is determining how each program’s digital components will support their classroom realities. Many math programs include engaging tech-powered elements and interactive tools, but not all features are equally evidence-backed or valued by the students and teachers who use them. 

When digital features enhance collaboration, provide actionable data, or adapt to student needs, they can help teachers differentiate instruction and keep students engaged. But if a program’s tech is misaligned to classroom needs, even a content-rich curriculum can fail to drive the desired learning outcomes, and features can go underused or even become cumbersome. Reviewing the digital aspects of a curriculum, and ensuring they align with effective teaching and learning, is a crucial step toward successful implementation.

CalCurriculum’s new Digital Product Feature Guidance helps leaders identify digital product features that can drive their instructional visions for math forward. The tool is designed to support curriculum adoption committees, district leaders, and teacher leaders in the process of selecting materials that align with instructional goals, address real classroom needs, and are most effective in day-to-day instruction.

Why This Guidance Matters

Nationwide, educators seek clearer direction when it comes to the technology in instructional materials. District leaders in California and beyond have shared that vendor presentations often showcase an array of digital bells and whistles, but it can be difficult to know which of those really matter for student learning. 

In response, the Digital Product Feature Guidance is a practical tool to help adoption teams make more confident decisions about which instructional materials offer the needed features to support their students and teachers. The guidance draws on up-to-date educational research and best practices in edtech integration. Product features were selected for the tool based on a combination of their potential for impact and how they address real teacher and student needs. In this way, the tool is designed to be both informative and actionable. 

The tool can also support decision-makers in surfacing digital features they may have not considered yet. By exploring the categories and examples, adoption teams may discover new product capabilities and broaden their understanding of what curricular programs might offer.

What’s In The Tool

The guidance breaks down teacher-facing digital features into five categories:

• Automation (automatic grading, group creation tools, item bank and templates, report generation)
• Customization (customizable presentations, creation and curation of practice materials, lesson plan customization, personalization of lesson content)
• Ease of Use (product usage guidance, searchability and intuitive navigation, technical support)
• Professional Learning (personalized professional development and resources on content, pedagogy, and enactment)
• Student Insights (diagnostic assessments, differentiation and intervention supports, messaging systems, performance data, real-time monitoring, usage and engagement data)

And student-facing digital features into three categories:

• Differentiation (adaptive assessments and learning pathways, adaptive supports, formative assessment)
• Ease of Use (interactive AI tutor, simple and intuitive navigation, authentic and relevant examples, gamification)
• Engagement (game-based learning and assessment, interactive manipulatives, multimedia, peer-to-peer interaction, student reflection tools)

Each feature includes clear indicators of what to look for in a product, as well as examples of what exemplary versions of a feature might look like (e.g., an exemplary adaptive assessment not only adjusts to student responses but also provides instant, actionable feedback). These details can help educators understand key functional features as well as those that go further to enhance learning.

The guidance also includes:

• Strength of Evidence: whether the feature is supported by strong, moderate, or emerging research, and associated citations
• Questions for Publishers: “Show me” and “Tell me” prompts to help confidently engage in deeper conversations with curriculum providers

Together, these elements offer a shared framework for adoption teams to assess digital strengths and compare products. The guidance can help leaders identify features that align with district and school learning priorities, from providing better differentiation for Multilingual Learners, to offering quality data dashboards for teachers, to ensuring the program is easy for teachers of all skill levels to use.

How To Use It

Districts can reference the guidance during any stage of the adoption process, especially once a shortlist of content-aligned, standards-based programs has been established.

Use the tool to:

• Evaluate digital feature quality across multiple products
• Guide rubric development and refine review criteria
• Ask publishers targeted and informative questions
• Align product feature needs to district priorities

Reviewers can also use the provided space in the tool to take notes on different curriculum products. The guidance can function as a common framework for your adoption team, ensuring everyone is examining shared criteria. It can also help your team articulate to stakeholders why one curriculum’s digital platform might serve teachers and learners better than another.

Who It’s For

This tool is tailored for California curriculum leaders, adoption committees, and school-based instructional teams navigating the upcoming math adoption cycle. Whether you’re leading rubric development, participating in vendor reviews, or evaluating implementation fit, the Digital Product Feature Guidance offers a clear, practical lens on digital quality.

As your district refines its own rubric for evaluating math curricula, the guide offers a key set of digital-focused criteria to consider, ensuring that your evaluation process extends beyond alignment and pedagogy to also probe the digital aspects that affect instructional practices and student experiences. Two products can offer similar content, but one might better support differentiated learning, or be easier for new teachers to navigate. This tool helps teams surface those distinctions so decisions can be made based on what matters most locally. 

By using the Digital Product Feature Guidance tool to assess curriculum and engage with providers, districts can be more confident and clear in selecting a program that aligns with the realities of classroom teaching and supports their educators and students from day one.