IES Blog

Games and other education technology are increasingly being used as a way to engage students in learning and support the work of teachers and educational leaders. The Institute of Education Sciences is proud to have been a part of this growth through its Small Business Innovation Research Program (ED/IES SBIR).

In recent years, thousands of schools around the country have used technologies developed through ED/IES SBIR funding, such as products by Filament Games, Fluidity Software, Zaption, and Mindset Works, to name a few. The program emphasizes a rapid research and development (R&D) process, with rigorous research informing iterative development and evaluating the promise of products for improving student outcomes. ED/IES SBIR also focuses on the commercialization after development is complete so that products can reach schools and be sustained over time.

This month, IES announced its 2016 awards, supporting 14 products covering a range of topics and forms of technology. Read about the awards here.

WATCH: YouTube Playlist of ED/IES SBIR PHASE II Awardees

The new awards continue two recent trends—developing new forms of assessment and applying next-generation technology for use in the classroom.

Emerging Forms of Assessment

All of the 2016 Phase II awards (for full-scale development) and several Phase I awards (for prototype development) are building technologies that center on assessment.

• Using Phase II awards, Brainquake and Querium are fully developing adaptive engines to assess student performance on standards-aligned topics in mathematics and provide feedback to students and teachers to improve performance and practice. Teachley and Apprendis are building platforms to organize student performance data and generate reports to inform teacher instruction. And 3C Institute is developing a website for special education teachers to assess and track the social and emotional development of students diagnosed with High Functioning-Autism Spectrum Disorder.
• Using Phase I awards, Analytic Measures is developing a prototype of an app to measure grade school student’s oral reading fluency and Early Learning Labs is developing a screening assessment for teachers of children who are Spanish-English Dual Language Learners.

The assessment trend echoes the broader movement in the field, and at ED, highlighted by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which calls for new forms of digital assessments, and the National Education Technology Plan, which includes a section on assessment.

Trend 2: Developing the Next Generation Technologies to Schools and Classrooms

Modern technological advances have transformed how we work and live every day.  For educators, the challenge is how to take advantage of next generation technologies in order to improve education. In the current group of Phase I awardees, many developers are seeking to make this happen.

• Schell Games is integrating a virtual reality headset within a game so that students can do immersive chemistry experiments;
• Spry Fox and Fablevision are developing mobile app-based learning games;
• Parametric Studios is developing an engineering and design platform that incorporates a 3D-printer.
• Analytic Measures is using automated speech recognition technology to assess students oral fluency in real-time; and
• Two projects are building web-based platforms to organize user-generated content to inform practice.  Future Engineers is developing a platform to facilitate engineering design challenges and EdSurge is building a platform to support administrators in selecting technology tools to support school improvement.  

More Opportunities for Innovation in Education

SBIR is not the only IES funding program that feeds the R&D and evaluation pipeline.  The grants programs in Education Research and Special Education Research  support developers across the arc of a project lifespan – from basic research to test theories to inform concept ideation, to development and refinement of interventions or assessments, and for efficacy evaluations to test fully developed interventions in schools.  All awards are multi-year with funding levels varying from $1.4 million for development to $3.3 million for efficacy evaluations.

The Low-Cost, Short Duration Evaluation of Education Interventions supports rigorous evaluations of education interventions (including technology) over a short period. For developers, this program provides the opportunity to strengthen the research-base for existing technology products over the course of a school year. All awards are for up to one year and $250,000. The Request for Applications for Fiscal Year 2017 for these programs is now open, with a submission deadline of August 4, 2016. 

Stay tuned for updates on Twitter (@IESResearch) as IES projects drive innovative forms of technology.

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

By Ruth Curran Neild, delegated director, IES

When you invite people into your home, you want everything to look nice. You clean up, organize, and do anything you can to make sure everyone has a pleasant experience. Now, imagine inviting millions of people into your home.

That is essentially what IES does every year with its website—we welcome millions of people to our online home so they can find the information, tools, and resources they want and need. A few years ago, we recognized that our home wasn’t the most welcoming place – and we decided to do something about it. Our users said the website was very text heavy and almost impossible to use on a mobile device, which is how an increasing number of users are visiting. And they said the way our site was organized made it hard for users to find what they were looking for and see the connections among our work.

Today, I am proud to announce that our home renovation has begun as we launch the first phase of a major website redesign that uses a more attractive, contemporary design, is mobile-friendly, and is better organized, including a new drop down navigation menu that makes it easier for our users to find what they are looking for.

The first phase updates our five top-level pages—the IES home page (pictured) and the landing pages for our four centers: the National Center for Education Research (NCER), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE); and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). For a comparison, here's a screenshot of the old website.

To develop the design of the new website, we spoke to focus groups of users, looked at data and analytics, and studied trends in web design. We think the result is a vast improvement over the previous site, and it will only get better over time. In the coming weeks and months we will update other pages, such as our Standards and Review Office, research programs, evaluation studies, the National Library of Education, and more.

To improve the user experience, we also will develop some new pages and content demonstrating the connection and continuity of the work that IES is doing. These include:

• Topic pages: These pages will bring together a broad array of research, evaluation, and statistics around a specific topic, such as early childhood education and high school graduation;
• A communications hub: A site where all of the latest IES news, press releases, and blogs will be hosted and easy to find; and
• An improved training site and events calendar: Information that better displays and tracks training opportunities and events.

Anyone who has been involved in a website redesign knows it is not easy. While only a handful of pages have launched today, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get to this point. I want to thank the many IES staff members and contractors who have developed and built our new site and congratulate them on a job well done. It will take us a while to fully update the website since it contains thousands and thousands of pages.

And, as with any new website, there may be some hiccups that will require further tweaking. If you see anything on our site that needs attention, please email us at Contact.IES@ed.gov and include a link to the content.

The new website is an important part of our overall efforts to improve our dissemination of the research, resources, and tools we support and develop. As I wrote in a recent piece on the Evidence Speaks website, progress is being made in this area, but we still have a lot of work to do before research is used on an everyday basis in the classroom and on campuses. In the coming months, IES will continue to make improvements to our online presences and outreach:

• In May, we will launch an IES Facebook page to better engage our community and share the work of IES on social media (UPDATE: The Facebook page has launched). We have already made improvements to our social media outreach on Twitter, and have added about 1,000 followers to the @IESResearch twitter feed this year, alone;
• In the fall, we will unveil a major redesign of the What Works Clearinghouse website and significant improvements to the Find What Works tool so it is easier to locate interventions and programs that make a difference; and
• Early next year, we expect to launch a major overhaul of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) websites to align with the start of the new REL contracts. The RELs are our primary dissemination network, and over the past five years have undertaken many new strategies for connecting research to policy and practice. The new REL contracts and website will further advance that work.

If you have other ideas for dissemination or outreach, please share them with us. We are always trying to improve. You can email our Communications Director, Dana Tofig, at dana.tofig@ed.gov. 

UPDATED May 13, 2016 to reflect the launch of the IES Facebook page.