IES Blog

For more than a decade, the Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research program, operated out of the Institute of Education Sciences, has funded projects to develop education technology designed to support students, teachers, and administrators in general or special education. The program, known as ED/IES SBIR, also focuses on the commercialization after development is complete so that the products can reach schools and be sustained over time. It’s research, with a start-up mentality.

In recent years, millions of students in schools around the country have used technologies developed through ED/IES SBIR funding, such as products by Filament Games, Sokikom, Agile Mind, and Mindset Works, to name a few.

This week, IES announced 18 ED/IES SBIR program awards for 2017. Of these awards, 11 are Phase I awards to develop and test a prototype, and seven are Phase II awards to fully develop and evaluate an education technology product in classrooms and schools. (See a video playlist of Phase II projects below)  

The new awards cover topics across math, science, engineering, reading, support social and behavioral development, and several are building platforms to inform decision-making by teachers and administrators. Several projects are pairing software with hardware-based technologies, such as Virtual Reality, 3D-printing, and Wearables.

The new awards also continue to fund projects in two major categories – learning games and dashboards for teachers and administrators.

Learning Games

For the past seven years, about half of ED/IES SBIR awards have focused on the development and evaluation of learning games (click here for a playlist). Continuing that trend, more than half of the 2017 ED/IES SBIR awards are for game-based technologies. Examples include:

• Phase II awardee Schell Games and Phase I awardee Electric Funstuff are building games for use with Virtual Reality headsets so that students can engage with academic content in immersive 360-degree environments;

• Phase II awardee Parametric Studios is creating a “makerspace” engineering simulated environment with a 3D-printer;

• Phase II awardee Fablevision is developing a fractions game with an adaptive component that auto-adjusts in difficulty to meet the competency level of individual students;

• Phase II awardee Spry Fox is building in-game supports and using rewards and competition to drive game play in teaching vocabulary to struggling middle school students and English Learners; and

• Phase I awardees MidSchoolMath and Happy People Games are using story-based narrative to engage students and apply learning, while Fokus Labs and Safe Toddles are creating prototypes employing wearable devices paired with a game component to improve performance.

Dashboards for Teachers and Administrators

Many of the newly funded projects are developing a dashboard component populated with data and information to generate reports that teachers and administrators can use to guide instruction and decision making. Examples include:

• Phase II awardee Analytic Measures is developing an automated speech recognition technology to assess students’ oral fluency in real-time with a dashboard to provide reports to inform teacher instruction;

• Phase II awardee Future Engineers is developing an open online platform that generates lists of engineering and maker-based projects for students in K-12 classrooms.

• Phase I projects by Story World, Strange Loop Games, TutorGen, Simbulus, and Myriad Sensors are creating prototypes of dashboards to provide teachers formative assessment results on student performance with reports to guide instruction; and 

• Two projects focus on platforms for schools administrators – a Phase II project by EdSurge to inform the selection process for technology for school improvement and a Phase I project by LiveSchool to generate reports on student behavior across classes and school.

Stay tuned for updates on Twitter and Facebook as IES continues to support innovative forms of technology.

Written by Edward Metz, program manager, ED/IES SBIR

By Dana Tofig, Communications Director, IES

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) will hold its annual meeting April 27 through May 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is one of the nation’s largest educational research conferences and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) will be well represented.

By Lauren Musu-Gillette

Have you ever read one of our reports and wondered where the data came from? Are you familiar with NAEP, but have never heard of IPEDS? Are you curious about the history of NCES? If so, our new video is perfect for you!

The full scope of NCES activities can be daunting for those not familiar with the Center. Our data collections include samples from early childhood to postsecondary education, and cover such diverse topics as math and reading achievement, the experiences of teachers and principals, and school crime. In addition, the Center has a rich history both within the Department of Education and as a federal statistical agency. To make our data, reports, and tools more accessible to the public, we’ve created a new video to help introduce you to who we are and what we do.

To learn more about the Center’s work, watch the video below and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

EDITOR'S NOTE:The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), a program of the Institute of Education Sciences, is a trusted source of scientific evidence on education programs, products, practices, and policies. The WWC also has many tools and resources for education researchers and students.  In this guest blog post, Jessaca Spybrook (pictured, below right), Associate Professor of Evaluation, Measurement and Research at Western Michigan University, discusses how she uses WWC procedures and standards as a teaching tool.

By Jessaca Spybrook, Western Michigan University

Training the next generation of researchers so they are prepared to enter the world of education research is a critical part of my role as a faculty member in the Evaluation, Measurement, and Research program. I want to ensure that my students have important technical skills in a host of subject areas including, but not limited to, research design, statistics, and measurement. At the same time, I want to be sure they know how to apply the skills to design and analyze real-world studies. I often struggle to find resources for my classes that help me meet both goals.

One resource that has emerged as an important tool in meeting both goals is the What Works Clearinghouse website. I frequently integrate materials from the WWC into the graduate research design and statistics courses I teach.

For example, in a recent class I taught, Design of Experiments and Quasi-Experiments, I used the WWC Procedures and Standards Handbook Version 3.0 throughout (an image from the publication is pictured below). The Handbook met four important criteria as I was selecting resources for my class:

1. Inclusion of important technical detail on design and analysis;
2. Up-to-date and current thinking and “best practice” in design and analysis;
3. Clear writing that is accessible for graduate students; and
4. It was free (always a bonus when searching for class materials).

By no means did the Handbook replace classic and well-regarded textbooks in the class. Rather, it helped connect classic texts on design to both recent advances related to design, as well as real-life considerations and standards that designs are judged against.

At the end of my class, students may have been tired of hearing the question, “what is the highest potential rating for this study?” But I feel confident that using the WWC Handbook helped me not only prepare graduates with the technical know-how they need to design a rigorous experiment or quasi-experiment, but also raised awareness of current best practice and how to design a study that meets important standards set for the field.

Over the years, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded over 300 studies across its research programs that evaluate the efficacy of specific programs, policies, or practices. This work has contributed significantly to our understanding of the interventions that improve outcomes for students under tightly controlled or ideal conditions. But is this information enough to inform policymakers’ and practitioners’ decisions about whether to adopt an intervention? If not, what should come after an efficacy study?