SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR Phase I project proposes to determine the feasibility of new software implementations of formative assessment (FA) techniques for mathematics instruction. Tablet devices such as the iPad have an enormous potential to facilitate revolutionary change in education, but such potential is heavily dependent on the availability of appropriate software and services. The proposed activities will research the extent to which classroom FA techniques can be applied or enhanced when the teacher's role is augmented by a platform for computer aided instruction. They will seek to create adaptive learning environments that go beyond current state-of-the-art systems and that apply the adaptivity to free-form content delivered as instructional video segments and highly interactive problems, and to do so while maintaining a flow of content that feels natural. The proposed activities also have the potential to provide new tools for the analysis of effective techniques in mathematics education and interventions. The ability to model student understanding and analyze the learning process will lead to the creation of new learning analytics tools and enable additional research into effective practices for the teaching and learning of mathematics. The potential broader impacts of the proposed activities include improved student access to mathematics; the increased participation of underrepresented groups in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); and improved STEM education through informed teacher practice and educator development. The proposed activities directly address mathematics education at a critical point in the curriculum: pre-algebra readiness, as set against the widely differing levels of mathematical fluency that emerge out of the elementary grades. Without a solid facility with pre-algebra mathematics, many subjects that are essential to participation in the modern world become difficult or impossible to master and academic confidence and commitment erode. More than any other subject, mathematical learning is cumulative, and as students fall behind their classmates, new material becomes less and less comprehensible and through this feedback they face an ever-widening gap to their peers. Formative assessment practices have been well-established as effective in closing these gaps and informing teacher decision making. It is by establishing toolkits with novel, software-based, formative assessment and helping to drive educator adoption of new formative assessment techniques that the proposed research may deliver these broader impacts. By addressing key customer needs, the project will create significant new commercial value within the educational

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to answer the presidential call to "create digital tutors that are as effective as personal tutors." More than any other subject, mathematical learning is cumulative, and as students fall behind their classmates, new material becomes less comprehensible and they can face an ever-widening gap to their peers. Formative assessment (FA) practices have been well established as effective in closing these gaps and informing teacher decision-making. While the influx of mobile computing devices has enormous potential to help facilitate change in education, the potential is heavily dependent on the availability of proven, research-backed software and services. This project will help close achievement gaps by providing students with adaptive, personalized instruction and also providing teachers with valuable FA techniques, data, and suggestions. More broadly, the data will yield opportunities to research and model student understanding and to analyze the learning process, enabling additional research into effective practices for the teaching and learning of mathematics. With its strong customer value propositions and innovations that will enable new forms of software-enhanced teaching and learning, this project will also create significant commercial value within the educational market. This project will create digital learning environments that go beyond current state-of-the-art systems to deliver adaptively selected instructional video segments and highly interactive problems, and do so while maintaining a flow of content that feels natural - as if the learning was occurring in the presence of an actual tutor. The ability of the system to adapt to the needs of an individual student is based upon a real-time assessment of student understanding and leverages cutting edge research from the fields of formative assessment, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data. The ability to model student understanding and analyze the learning process will lead to the creation of new learning analytics tools and enable additional research into effective practices for the teaching and learning of mathematics. The proposed research will seek to demonstrate, in a randomized crossover trial, the effectiveness of the adaptive, online system over a control treatment. The researched solutions will also employ novel FA implementations such as collaborative review and white-boarding (via wireless communication), record and playback of teacher work, use of student sentiment, groupings of peers for collaborative work, and models of student understanding that incorporate teacher input (teacher plus software in the FA loop).