A new, free-to-use reading curriculum is available now for educators working with grades 4-9!

R&D partner and AERDF Awardee, Read STOP Write, has created a research-backed, freely available curriculum resource to help students build comprehension and knowledge while reading complex informational texts. Led by a team of researchers at University at Buffalo and Michigan State University, the Read STOP Write project has developed and tested a new curriculum with teachers and students that integrates instruction in evidence-based practices for teaching multisyllabic decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing. 

The curriculum includes lesson plans, slide decks, and student materials, with 24 weeks of lessons for grades 4-5 and 12 weeks of lessons in grades 6-9. It is the outcome of AERDF’s signature R&D model – an approach that compresses traditional R&D timelines from decades to just 3–5 years, so students benefit now, not later, and systems evolve faster. 

Read STOP Write’s curriculum grew out of the same evidence base that informed a 2024 partnership between AERDF’s flagship R&D program, Reading Reimagined, and ETS.  

At AERDF, our goal is to create a virtuous cycle from research to development and back again. While confirming the decoding threshold is an important milestone, it is equally important that organizations like Read STOP Write are funded to create scalable solutions aimed at solving this problem for educators and students.  

Read STOP Write directly addresses these challenges by embedding instruction in foundational literacy skills, including multisyllabic decoding, vocabulary, and fluency, within ambitious instruction focused on promoting comprehension and writing in response to grade-level texts – delivered in ready-to-use lesson plans, slides, and student materials. 

At AERDF, we accelerate discovery, development, and diffusion, ensuring innovations move efficiently from idea to classroom and evolve through real-world use. This new curriculum is just one example. By building the infrastructure, partnerships, and national capacity, we ensure bold discoveries go beyond the lab or academic journals, reaching classrooms and transforming learning.

📚 Explore and share the free curriculum!

🔍 Learn more about the decoding threshold research.

Throughout history, moments have invited us to rethink how learning happens, who it serves, and what it could become. And yet, many of these opportunities have come and gone without the lasting change they promised.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one such moment. It revealed long-standing inequities, catalyzed fresh thinking, and sparked a desire for new approaches from education leaders and entire communities. Five years later, it’s fair to say that turning the desire for a more learner-centric model into a reality anchored in practice was uneven and sparse. But innovation and transformation did happen.

A new brief, Seizing the Opportunity for State Education R&D: Findings and Recommendations for Action, by Education Reimagined and Transcend, in partnership with the Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI), describes some examples.

Each example showcases a universal truth: a specific set of underlying conditions and infrastructure for learner-centered change had to be in place for success. Those conditions and infrastructure provide a promising blueprint for reimagining learning and innovation in today’s educational environment.

Evaluating the Conditions and Infrastructure That Matter Most

As we ride another wave of uncertainty across the educational landscape—the expiration of COVID-19 relief funds and shrinking public school district budgets, cuts to federally funded research initiatives, and opportunities and challenges around AI integration—we need to understand where, when, and how to create systems that support and sustain learner-centered change no matter what comes next.

In April, five education innovation organizations—Learner-Centered Collaborative (LCC), Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), Leanlab Education, InnovateEDU, and the Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI)—convened a national group of 20+ leaders at ASU+GSV in San Diego to discuss the potential and promise of regional innovation hubs to prepare every community for the unexpected.

Regional innovation hubs are collaborative ecosystems defined by citywide, statewide, or multi-state collaboration that bring together local educators, researchers, technologists, and community leaders. These hubs provide a collaborative learning, experimentation, and progress framework that aligns with each community’s unique needs and strengths.

Using the eight recommendations from the Seizing the Opportunity for State Education R&D brief as a conversation starter, participants assessed the importance and urgency of each one as it relates to the development of these regional hubs:

Recommended Condition/Infrastructure	Participant Notes
Condition: Establish a state vision and goals that prioritize innovation and continuous improvement.	“If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there.”
Condition: Establish a dedicated office to oversee and drive state education R&D.	“There are different models. This could be one, but there are tradeoffs.” “Some capacity is needed, but not necessarily this solution.”
Condition: Empower local leaders to test evidence-based solutions and develop innovative models that improve learner experiences and inform systems.	“Locally-embedded solutions are needed to demonstrate possibility.” “This has to be rooted in community for the best ideas to come forth and for the work to be sustainable.”
Condition: Identify and build the needed capacity that impacts mindset and behavior change.	“Mindsets are a necessary starting place.” “Focus on individuals as close to students as possible.”
Infrastructure: Modernize state longitudinal data systems (SLDS)	“This can occur once the vision is clear and the ecosystem has modeled a data system.” “It depends on the current system in place, especially given federal pullback.”
Infrastructure: Leverage tools, artificial intelligence, and technology platforms to support and enable education R&D.	“Necessary for today’s world and for the future.” “Needs to be aligned to the vision and connected to local leaders.”
Infrastructure: Build human capacity through partnerships, networks, and community engagement.	“Creates capacity, connectedness, and momentum.” “Having networks across contexts supports local innovations and policy implementation.”
Infrastructure: Provide technical support for R&D activities and continuous improvement.	“Tech support is valuable, and partnerships with expert organizations are important.”

 

Why Regional? Why Now?

The shape and scope of federal funding in education are evolving, including a potential shift toward regionally focused investments in research and innovation. With that shift comes an important question: Are communities equipped to lead?

We believe they can be.

Regional ecosystems offer the ideal scale for experimentation and evolution. They’re big enough to impact systems, small enough to build trust, and flexible enough to adapt to context. In short, regional hubs are where vision meets action.

Promising examples of regional education innovation hubs exist. In Missouri, 114 school districts collaborate via the Success-Ready Students Network to redesign assessments aligned with competency-based, real-world learning.

In Columbus, Ohio, a brand new initiative launched in 2024 called the Columbus Learning Ecosystem Initiative—”A tight partnership of the STEM visionary PAST Foundation, learner-centered leader 100 Roads, and Education Reimagined.” This initiative was originally born from a need to address the city’s fast population growth and increase the availability of skilled workers. As a result, they came up with the following solution:

“While the urgent need for workforce development has sparked this K–12 evolution, this learner-centered ecosystem is fundamentally designed to support the fulfillment, purpose and sense of belonging among learners. It’s developed to ensure young people find their role in the burgeoning community, seize opportunity as businesses grow, and understand ways they can contribute. It’s an endeavor to fundamentally change what K–12 teaching and learning looks like in Columbus.”

In North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, they have formed the Ed-Tech Collaboratory—an initiative focused on enhancing operational efficiency for education agencies and improving student outcomes through the use of common data strategies, infrastructure, and modern software solutions. This collaboratory endeavors to create and maintain replicable models for state data systems, aiming to make education more responsive, adaptable, and student-focused for the future.

Looking at the backstory of each initiative, specifically when and why each began, we might note there is always a moment to reimagine our systems and structures so that every learner is fully seen, supported, and empowered. That moment is here and now in all our communities, so let’s explore how we might respond and rethink how we do school.

What We Need to Build

Several cross-cutting elements should guide the creation and scaling of regional hubs. Below are insights gathered both in our April conversation at ASU+GSV and in the Seizing the Opportunity for State Education R&D brief:

• State-Level Advocacy: States can act as important allies—advocating for enabling policies, aligning data systems, and ensuring coherence in service of grassroots or district-level innovation.
• Capacity Building: Regional hubs must invest in developing people who do the work and shape it, not just in programs. This means supporting educators, community leaders, and learners themselves.
• Collaborative Ecosystems: Innovation doesn’t thrive in silos. Successful hubs will be those that foster deep partnerships across sectors and roles.
• Data & Infrastructure: To learn what works and scale what matters, robust systems for measurement and evidence generation, actionable feedback, and iteration are essential.
• Communication & Amplification: Moving fast and sharing broadly will be critical to building momentum across regions and fueling a national movement.
• Authenticity & Purpose: Amidst the complexity, the work must stay grounded in what matters most: the humanity of learners, educators, and communities.

What Comes Next

Building regional hubs is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Each hub must reflect its local context’s needs, assets, and aspirations. Some may emerge within a single district, others may form through statewide coalitions, and others may span geographic or thematic boundaries.

What matters most is that the work begins, that leaders, educators, researchers, and communities come together around a shared purpose, and that we work together to build ecosystems from the ground up.

This work is just beginning. And you can be part of it!

We are continuing this conversation in person at ISTELive 25 in San Antonio, TX. If you plan on attending and would like to know more details about our regional innovation hubs conversation, please email us at info@aerdf.org. If you are not attending, but would like to be involved in future conversations or simply receive updates about the work, submit your information here.

Together, we can co-create a future where education innovation is local, change is lasting, and every learner is seen, heard, and empowered.

Education systems that were able to adapt and innovate during the COVID-19 pandemic had community-aligned visions; distributed leadership that allowed for rapid ideation and iteration; strong community-based partnerships, including with parents; support systems to build and sustain educator capacity; and the underlying technological and data infrastructure that made sense for their context. Without these robust conditions and infrastructures in place, it was difficult to do more than tread water during the ongoing uncertainty of a global pandemic.

If we want to make the most of future opportunities—and better yet, create them—we need to invest now in the foundational elements that make systemic transformation in education possible. We hope you’ll join us!

Written in collaboration with leaders from AERDF, ALI, InnovateEDU, Leanlab Education, and Learner-Centered Collaborative

Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, spoke with Edtech Insiders at THE AI SHOW @ ASU+GSV to emphasize the importance of learning science to harness the power of AI in education. Take a listen to the conversation between Auditi Chakravarty and Alex Sarlin to hear why grounding AI in research and practical classroom needs is key to truly advance AI’s role in teaching and learning.

This is our approach at AERDF. Each of our R&D programs is exploring applications of AI, and AugmentED, our newest program, will focus squarely on discovering how AI can enhance human teaching, rather than replace it. Check out the full interview here:

 

Decoding is a foundational literacy skill where readers break down and sound out unfamiliar words to understand them. Mounting evidence, including a 2024 replication study by Reading Reimagined and ETS that confirmed a decoding threshold, suggests decoding may explain why so many older students continue to read below national standards.

“If you teach kids to break words into their smallest meaningful pieces, like ‘un-’ for ‘not’ or ‘-ness’ for a state of being, they’re more likely to be able to handle ‘unhappiness’ by spotting its parts,” recommends Rebecca Kockler, executive director of Reading Reimagined. Read the article to understand the pressing need for the sector to reconsider how we teach foundational literacy skills in schools.

Assessment For Good, a R&D program with the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), creates rigorous assessments that provide a comprehensive picture into skills that power learning. While most assessments focus on subject mastery, educators are often missing information about foundational skills to understand the next best step to support the learning process. Even if thoughtful educators want to understand student learning, existing assessments are limited in terms of portraying personalized and contextualized views of learning beyond whether or not a state standard was reached. AFG is focused on how to more effectively measure over 30 skills that power learning, such as perspective taking, initiation, or metacognition, which are key parts of the learning equation, but are often missed in the information we provide to educators for instructional decision-making.

At AFG, inclusive research and development (R&D) is at the core of how we build. At this year’s AI show at ASU/GSV, we shared a case study highlighting how AFG has scaled its inclusive R&D approach through a strategic and intentional integration of AI, while keeping community voice at the center. Our goal was to honor educators and learners as the expert—ensuring a continuous community loop throughout the process to center subject matter expertise and community insights as part of our R&D process.

 

Our assessment development process starts and ends with the learners we serve.

From the start, every assessment item or question has been shaped by real feedback from learners. From 2022 until very recently, nearly 1000 assessment items were co-created with learners to ensure they reflect learners’ contexts and reflect the assets they bring. This feedback loop ensures our assessments reflect not just academic standards, but learners’ lived experiences.

In 2024, we built a capability that explored the use of generative AI as a tool to inform assessment development. Instead of thinking about this as a way to replace the human-in-the-loop, we thought about how to leverage an inclusive process that expanded how learner, educator, and research expertise contribute to assessment development, while reducing the resource burden of measure development, which is felt across the assessment industry.

What is different about this process?

We wanted to include the learner and educator voice at the beginning, middle, and end. Our training set of items was rooted in AFG’s scientific framework and that was carried through to subject matter expert review, in which AI generated assessment items were accepted, rejected, or revised for inclusion. Overall, the AI generated items had an acceptance rate of 82% for alignment to our scientific frameworks. Lastly, we tested our AI generated items alongside our human-generated items with students and found no differences in item performance. In six months, we’d been able to increase our bank of assessment items by 167%, far faster than if we had continued to generate them all by hand. This technical capability, born out of our inclusive R&D efforts, can now be deployed within AFG’s other assessment products to personalize assessments at scale or licensed to other assessment creators.

 

Our AI strategy is to support and scale human-centered processes, not replace them.

By anchoring AI tools in trusted knowledge bases, including content informed by learners and educators, we can streamline content creation while maintaining high ecological validity—the alignment between what’s being assessed and the real world learners inhabit. We believe that more assessment development processes should be broadened to include a greater variety of experts in the process, including learners, caregivers, and educators; the key to better R&D is to continue to center their voice.

Inclusive R&D isn’t about completing a checklist—it’s a smarter approach to development. By honoring human insight and strategically using AI to support, not replace, community-driven expertise, we’re redefining what it means to scale assessment innovation.

This Spring, AERDF is excited to share our innovations and impact while connecting with educators, researchers, technologists, and innovators at three leading national conferences. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear firsthand from our team and partners about our scientific breakthroughs and how advanced research and development that centers learners and teachers can push the boundaries of what’s possible in PreK–12 education.

Here’s where you can find us this month:

 

ASU+GSV Summit
San Diego, CA | April 6–9, 2025

 

We’re thrilled to join some of the most influential voices in education, innovation, and technology this weekend at the 2025 ASU+GSV Summit.

Tune in to presentations from AERDF and R&D partners during the AI Learning Show on April 7th:

 

 

Catch our team in panel discussions exploring the power of collaborative R&D and how to secure funding for breakthrough ideas:

 

   

 

And don’t miss our interactive Glass classroom workshop spotlighting the latest insights and innovations from AERDF with our R&D partners! Participants will get a behind-the-scenes look at our evidence-based, learner-centered education breakthroughs and how they come to fruition—from concept, to prototype, to adoption.

 

 

 

Eighth Annual CREA Conference
Chicago, IL | April 8-11, 2025 

 

At this year’s CREA Conference, AERDF’s Assessment for Good team will lead a session focused on what students themselves say they need to succeed and feel supported in school. Dr. Leslie Nabors Oláh and Dr. Lauren D. Kendall Brooks will share insights from their research highlighting how AFG has invited and cultivated student partnership into its R&D process to develop learner-centered assessment tools.

 

 

 

AERA Annual Meeting
Denver, CO | April 23–27, 2025

 

We are excited to showcase our R&D at the upcoming American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in Denver! From examining how math beliefs, anxiety, and metacognition interact to shape problem-solving skills to exploring new findings on decoding challenges and targeted support for older students, join AERDF’s R&D teams and partners for engaging sessions and evidence-based approaches.

 

   

 

 

Stay tuned to our social channels for real-time updates and reflections, and we look forward to seeing many of you on our travels!

“Assessment has really tried to serve so many purposes in education, from trying to make sure resources get aligned in the right place for the right learners at the right time to supporting educators trying to understand how to unlock the next instructional moment. This is because assessment can give us a lot of information–it’s one of the most powerful levers we have in education [to make informed teaching and learning decisions]. However when assessment is used improperly, it can lead to decisions that close doors for opportunity for learners all across this nation,” highlights Dr. Temple Lovelace, Executive Director of Assessment for Good, one of AERDF’s flagship programs, in a recent episode of the Teaching Matters Podcast, from NPR.

The power of assessment was at the heart of the conversation between Dr. Lovelace and Dr. Scott Titsworth. Together, they explored the possibilities of formative assessment, the implications of high-stakes testing, and innovative approaches to assessment—including the uses of AI and machine learning—that prioritize learner-centered practices.

To best support students to thrive in school and lead in our rapidly changing world, we need accurate and understandable information about student learning as it happens, not just the moment they’re sitting taking a test. Listen to the episode to be inspired by new ideas on how assessment can be an invaluable tool that helps maximize the growth and potential of all learners.

Imagine a future where the limits of today’s knowledge are the starting point for unlocking critical scientific insights and technical capabilities that push us just beyond what we believe is possible in education – that’s where our work at the Advanced Education Research and Develop Fund (AERDF) begins.

In a recent conversation with Mike Palmer for the Trending in Ed podcast, Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of AERDF, explained how AERDF’s R&D model starts at the edge of what the science of learning tells us we know. It is from that edge that we consider what must be proven or unlocked today, so that in three to five years what’s happening in the classroom looks very different. And not just different, but better. Where far more students are positioned to thrive in the economic and global conditions they will face.

In this podcast episode, you will hear how our programs are using R&D to bridge scientific research with real-world applications by co-designing solutions with educators, students, and caregivers to produce scientific knowledge, technical capabilities, and scalable classroom-ready prototypes:

1. With a focus on mathematical conceptual understanding and complex problem-solving, EF+Math, in its final phases as an AERDF program, explores strengthening executive functioning (EF) while innovating math teaching and learning. EF+Math’s R&D teams, Fraction Ball, MathicSTEAM, and CueThinkEF+, are generating evidence-based solutions proving that creating math learning experiences that bring out the innate skills inside every student can improve math outcomes.
2. By leveraging the power of AI and the expertise of learners, Assessment for Good is creating a more seamless and game-based assessment experience that encourages students to want to use these tools because they learn more about who they are as learners and that provides educators with instructional strategies in real-time.
3. Reading Reimagined aims to better support older students who need to develop foundational reading skills, like decoding by breaking down and sounding out unfamiliar words to understand their meaning. Having confirmed the decoding threshold, Reading Reimagined is now working to develop, test, and implement tools to assess students’ decoding skills and curriculum that bolsters foundational reading skills.
4. While much of today’s conversation centers on using AI to make current approaches to education more efficient, AugmentED, our newest program, will bring together expert teachers, researchers, and technologists to reimagine education for the AI era, developing and testing new teaching approaches and AI-powered tools to nurture every student’s potential.

Take a listen to the podcast to hear about the distinct ways that AERDF is using R&D to catalyze and expedite advancements in teaching and learning.

“NAEP is a critical tool for providing transparency, informing education policy decisions, and examining long-term trends in student outcomes,” asserted Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), in an article by The Hill.

The recent cancellation of the long-term NAEP assessment for 17-year-olds by the U.S. Department of Education raises concerns about the future of educational data transparency. Research-backed policies ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently on education initiatives that are most likely to bolster student achievement. Without reliable and accurate data, we risk the rigor of our education system and leave the success of our students to chance.

Read the article to better understand what is at stake with respect to this vital resource for educators, parents, and policymakers.