Framing the 5% Problem: Teachers'' Perspectives on Persistence in Educational Technology

Synthesis: Borchers (2026) reports on a 90-minute participatory design workshop with 12 U.S. middle school mathematics teachers using i-Ready Math weekly. Thematic analysis identified four recurring dimensions of low student persistence: motivation and buy-in, cognitive roadblocks, resilience under challenge, and contextual barriers. Teachers emphasized the need to identify where students become stuck and recognize silent disengagement, prioritizing support for diagnosis and timely instructional response over aggregate usage metrics. This reframes the '5% problem' from an analytics gap to a situated instructional challenge, suggesting that Teaching and AI Adoption Among Teachers: Insights on Concerns, Support, Confidence, and Attitudes must be centered when designing Adaptive Learning systems for K-12 contexts. The work connects to Student Experience research and engagement metrics by arguing that teacher-facing systems supporting interpretation of persistence through both cognitive and contextual evidence are needed.

Key Findings

• A 90-minute participatory design workshop with 12 U.S. middle school mathematics teachers using i-Ready Math surfaced four recurring dimensions of low persistence: motivation and buy-in, cognitive roadblocks, resilience under challenge, and contextual barriers.
• Teachers stressed that identifying where students become stuck and recognizing silent disengagement matters more than tracking aggregate usage metrics.
• Participants prioritized support for diagnosis and timely instructional response, framing low persistence as a situated instructional challenge rather than a pure analytics/usage gap.
• The findings argue for teacher-facing systems that surface both cognitive and contextual evidence about persistence, not just engagement counts.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Treat stalled progress and quiet compliance as diagnostic signals rather than absence of effort: workshop participants described students who disengaged without visible frustration and named distinguishing confusion from avoidance as one of their hardest judgments.
• Read platform usage time against context. The teachers attributed low persistence to motivation and buy-in, cognitive roadblocks, resilience under challenge, and contextual barriers such as attendance and unreliable devices, so a few minutes of practice time cannot by itself reveal which is at work.
• Aim Learning Analytics displays at interpretation rather than reporting — surfacing where a student has stalled and when to intervene — since teachers said tracking aggregate Student Engagement metrics mattered less than knowing where students get stuck.
• Pair each persistence priority with a concrete classroom response, such as reframing productive struggle or building independent problem-solving routines, because participants treated resilience as a teachable skill their current routines and dashboards did little to support.
• Update the Teaching expectations embedded in Adaptive Learning rollouts: give teachers time and permission to investigate cause before the system nudges them toward more practice minutes.

Limitations

• The evidence rests on one 90-minute participatory design workshop with 12 volunteer middle school mathematics teachers drawn from two schools in a single Pacific U.S. district, all using one platform (i-Ready Math).
• The authors note that group discussion may have amplified vocal participants and that card-sort labels partially shaped later coding.
• The workshop captured stated priorities rather than classroom behavior: triangulation with classroom observations, student interviews, or longitudinal prototype trials was not conducted and is what the authors say would test transferability.
• Perspectives may reflect local implementation norms and partnership recruitment, so the four themes should be treated as a needs-finding result rather than a validated model of persistence.

Citation

Conrad Borchers (2026). Framing the 5% Problem: Teachers' Perspectives on Persistence in Educational Technology. EC-TEL 2026