Driving and Inspiring Greater Quality in Education Innovation
Our education system is going through a time of tremendous change and uncertainty. With challenges ranging from the demands of AI integration, looming budget cuts, teacher shortages, and significant cuts to education research by the federal government, the context of PreK-12 education is rapidly changing.
At the ISTELive25 and ASCD Annual Conference, the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) led conversations aimed at learning and collaboration as a means to meeting the challenges of the moment and charting a path forward together.
As the nation’s first discovery and invention hub for education, we start at the front end of learning science and innovation, seeking the fundamental, cutting-edge research and new technical capabilities needed to solve for persistent, complex teaching and learning problems.
Through our portfolio of R&D programs, we combine scientific rigor with co-design to discover breakthrough solutions that unite educators, scientists, and technologists with students to tackle the public education’s most pressing challenges.
What Innovation Looks Like: AERDF Awardees at ISTE+ASCD
To demonstrate what’s possible when we break down siloes and center learners and educators in education R&D, AERDF debuted the latest advancements in math, literacy, assessment, and AI at this year’s ISTE+ASCD Annual Conference. From literacy screening in minutes to boosting math comprehension in the schoolyard to co-designing strengths-based formative assessments using the power of generative AI, AERDF’s R&D programs and awardees are generating new scientific research, technical advancements, and dynamic prototypes pushing on the edge of what’s believed to be possible in education.
In this blog, we share many of the latest inventions and developments from our AERDF Awardees and partners across our R&D Programs – EF+Math, Assessment for Good, Reading Reimagined, and AugmentED – including: Magpie Literacy, Juego, Stanford ROAR, Big Words Project, Read STOP Write, Achievement Network, Throughline Learning, MindCatcher, Playlab AI, MIND Research Institute, University of Tennessee, University of Buffalo, Texas A&M, Michigan State University, University of Denver, Georgia Southern University, Leanlab Education, Learner-Centered Collaborative, Alliance for Learning Innovation, InnovateEDU, and The Reinvention Lab at Teach for America.
Take a look at the evidence-backed education solutions and insights our R&D programs are generating. These are making their way into the hands of thousands of educators and learners and impacting math, reading, assessment, and the future of teaching in the age of AI.
Click the tabs TO LEARN MORE
Helping Every Student Become a Capable and Confident Reader
What happens when a student who struggles to read throughout middle and high school finally graduates? They are likely to become an adult who still struggles to read. And what happens then? Studies have shown that low literacy rates exacerbate everything from poverty and health care to low civic engagement, as reported in The Hill in 2024. This is an unacceptable outcome for our students that the following AERDF Awardees with our Reading Reimagined R&D program are working to change.
The Future of Literacy Assessment
What if literacy screening took minutes—not hours—and gave teachers instant, actionable data to help every reader thrive? Stanford University’s Brain Development & Education Lab is replacing the cycle of time-consuming literacy screening that requires teacher training with a fast, reliable, and scalable screening tool that saves critical district resources.
The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) platform provides an efficient and effective way to assess students’ foundational literacy skills on a large scale, helping educators track reading ability and progress across grade levels at a fraction of the time of traditional screening tools. Reading Reimagined brought together partners from Stanford University and the Achievement Network (ANet) to test the assessment tool in schools to help educators identify older students struggling to read. ROAR is now used in over 180 schools and organizations nationwide, serving 40,000+ students. It’s approved as a statewide reading screener in California, Minnesota, and Ohio.
The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading emerged from over a decade of research in cognitive neuroscience. ROAR is validated in classrooms K-12 against gold-standard assessments used by clinicians and educational professionals, including Woodcock-Johnson, TOWRE, TOSREC, and CTOPP, as well as assessments used widely in schools, including FastBridge, DIBELS, and state standardized tests. Available in English and Spanish, ROAR assessments show high accuracy across grades and demographic groups, including race, ethnicity, gender, English learner status, special education status, and socioeconomic status. Analyses are updated regularly with the most current data, and they are reported publicly in the ROAR Technical Manual.
Doubling Reading Success for All Students
Five years ago, Reading Reimagined set out to solve the problem of the decoding threshold. Research tells us that readers who do not exceed a certain decoding threshold – the point at which students can recognize and sound out words accurately and efficiently – cannot access reading comprehension and won’t show growth in reading proficiency. But current solutions do not apply this insight…until now.
Magpie Literacy has developed videos, games, and assessment tools that boost measurable gains in reading to solve the problem of the decoding threshold. Through years of R&D work with our Reading Reimagined program alongside researchers, educators, and developers, Magpie Literacy is now delivering big results for thousands of students in 15 school districts across the county.
In Magpie’s most recent evaluation study with a prominent school district that included over 1,100 kindergarten students, students who used Magpie were 2x more likely to meet future reading goals. Magpie significantly benefited all students, particularly those with the lowest reading proficiency.
Proven Literacy Gains
Read STOP Write is improving foundational reading skills, comprehension, motivation, and writing proficiency for students in grades 4-9 through its novel approach to reading intervention. Created in partnership between researchers at University at Buffalo and Michigan State University, Read STOP Write integrates evidence-based practices, a multi-step approach, and authentic grade-level texts across science and social studies. This adaptable program can be used as a whole-class supplemental curriculum or a small-group intervention.
Read STOP Write was developed and tested in rigorous research with more than 50 teachers and 2,000 students in five school districts across three states. In four studies, students who have received Read STOP Write have experienced significantly better literacy outcomes than students receiving alternative interventions or typical instruction. This innovation has shown evidence of improving word recognition, decoding skills, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing quality in diverse urban elementary schools.
Read STOP Write is now available for download at https://www.readstopwrite.com/.
Breaking Down Big Words
Young students who find reading challenging in elementary school often keep struggling as they get older, yet explicit literacy instruction often ends by second grade. The Big Words Project offers an engaging approach that helps older elementary students practice breaking down, identifying words, and spelling words with multiple syllables, prefixes, and suffixes. Participating teachers have benefitted from the online, self-paced professional development developed by professors at the University of Tennessee and Texas A&M University. Across a number of studies and contexts, educators who use the Big Words program have reported greater confidence in identifying reading challenges in their students and having the strategies to help them.
In a recent study, for example, students’ whose teachers were trained on the Big Words Project had higher growth on standardized tests compared to students whose teachers used a well-known literacy intervention curriculum. Students also showed a reduction in avoidance of reading, anxiety, and an increase in motivation of reading, which are critical parts of re-engaging struggling upper elementary readers.
The overall design of the Big Words Project content integrated a design-based research approach that included teachers from varied settings who contributed to the co-design of the materials. In an effort to support fidelity and integrity of implementation and to reach as many educators as possible, the program developers also designed an asynchronous online professional development to mitigate challenges associated with more traditional professional development approaches, like cost and time.
Soon, any educator can complete the Big Words course at their own pace, learning about topics including morphology, stress, and schwa, along with how to use the Big Words’ program reading and spelling strategies. By the end of the training, they can also download the teacher instructional guide, student book, and all accompanying posters and games. The course will be accessible for free registration and completion by November 2025.
Each of these Reading Reimagined-supported products and resources is accessible and flexible to fit into a teacher’s busy day. By introducing these education products into the classroom, teachers, even if they are not trained in foundational literacy instruction, can make informed decisions quickly, allowing for timely interventions that have been proven to support improved reading skills.