William Cope

  This project team created a new technology to improve student writing performance and the usefulness of writing assessments. U-learn.net is an online environment that combines social networking and semantic tagging technologies to give learners constant feedback in the form of on-demand formative assessment. The 'u' of the u.learn  stands for 'ubiquitous' or the idea that social networking technologies allow the social relationships of learning to continue beyond the classroom and tradit...

The CGScholar AI Helper is an innovative generative AI-powered writing and learning assistant developed by Common Ground Publishing. Building on successful Phase I pilots in four schools, the tool integrates into the CGScholar platform to provide rubric-based, teacher-customized feedback that helps students improve writing through immediate, targeted guidance.

New forms of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offer promise in education for personalizing teaching and learning. In previous projects supported by ED/IES SBIR awards and other sources, the team developed the CGScholar writing system. In this project the team will develop a prototype of CGScholar with an AI helper, a new web software application that will employ GenAI to offer real-time feedback as students write texts.

In this project, the team developed a prototype of InfoWriter, a Web 2.0 concept mapping tool and writing environment to support students in writing informational and explanatory texts. The final product is intended for use in middle and high school English Language Arts classrooms, and others as appropriate, to supplement traditional writing assignments.

Researchers trained six postdoctoral fellows for 2 years each to become well-rounded researchers. The research opportunities offered to fellows included (1) innovations in formative and summative assessment, (2) the development of methods for assessment of complex performance (such as writing), (3) the disciplinary practices of discipline areas captured in written reports and essays, and (4) the evaluation of a large-scale assessment tool used by the state of Illinois.

In the early 2000s, a key educational priority was to use summative assessment both as a measure of learner progress and as an incentive for school improvement. At the same time, many educators and researchers supported also using formative assessment, or assessment for screening, monitoring and diagnosis to aid ongoing learning throughout the academic year. In this project, the research team created a new educational technology tool intended to improve student writing performance and writi...