AERDF was founded to unlock scientific breakthroughs and advance research-backed solutions to pressing challenges in PreK-12 education. Last year, we launched a search for our next program. Our call attracted close to 400 proposals at the cutting edge of education, with strong potential for discovering new capabilities that would significantly improve our teaching, learning and assessment systems.
We’re proud to introduce AERDF’s newest program.
Founded and led by Sherry Lachman and Caitlin Mills, AugmentED tackles one of education’s most urgent challenges: how to harness the power of AI to transform teaching and learning. While much of today’s conversation centers on using AI to make current approaches to education more efficient, AugmentED will bring together expert educators, researchers, and technologists to reimagine the role of educators and the learning experiences of students for the age of AI and co-create AI-powered tools to support this transformation.
Our Vision
AugmentED envisions a future where teachers and AI work in harmony to nurture the full potential of all students. This vision imagines educators in a new role: as conductors of a symphony of learning, managing an orchestra of students and AI-powered tools to transform student outcomes. Educators, for example, might use one AI tool for personalized projects, another to guide group collaboration, and a third to run engaging simulations. With data and support from these tools, educators will better tailor their instruction to their students’ needs and spend more time motivating and building relationships with students in ways only humans can.
A Path toward Reimagining Teaching and Learning for the Age of AI
Joining our three existing programs, AugmentED will leverage AERDF’s Advanced R&D model to generate new scientific research and build dynamic prototypes. Unlike traditional technology efforts that engage teachers as product testers, AugmentED will put teachers in the driver’s seat from day one as true co-designers. Throughout the initiative’s lifecycle, AugmentED will partner with expert teachers, cutting edge researchers, and technologists to:
- Reimagine the roles of educators by designing innovative and AI-enhanced approaches to teaching that will equip students with future-ready skills.
- Co-design AI-powered tools alongside more effective teaching approaches to accelerate student learning and support teachers in their new roles.
- Iterate on and refine innovations in classroom settings to ensure they are effective and scalable across learning contexts.
- Generate research insights and share them widely, building an open community where educators, researchers, and technologists can learn from and build on our discoveries.
Meet the Founder, Executive Director of AugmentED
Sherry Lachman
A policymaker, lawyer, and social entrepreneur, Sherry has served in senior White House roles in two presidential administrations, focusing on education, labor, and social services. She has also led social impact initiatives at OpenAI, founded Foster America, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the U.S. child welfare system, and served as a senior education advisor in the U.S. Senate and Department of Education.
And the Co-Founder, Chief Research and Impact Officer
Caitlin Mills, PhD
A researcher at the intersection of psychology, computer science, and education, Caitlin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Her lab focuses on mind wandering, engagement, and emotions during learning with multi-method approaches to inform theory and practice.
What’s Next for AugmentED
In the coming months, AugmentED will be seeking partners in education, research, and technology to join us in reimagining education for the age of generative AI. By combining the best of AI with the best of teacher instruction, we can create a future where every child—regardless of background—has access to an education that prepares them for a rapidly evolving world.
Let’s co-create the future of learning, together.
The need for innovative solutions to help students recover from pandemic learning disruptions and an unpredictable future of work has never been more urgent. The nation needs all hands on deck — educator and community partnership, high research & ethical standards for ed tech and importantly, federal and state investment in inclusive education R&D.
As Chief Learning Officer at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, I have seen first-hand the real impact that systemic change and student-centered and research-based design of educational technology can make. Understanding the experiences of students, caregivers, and educators is essential to staying learner-focused from the outset, especially because caregivers hold dreams for their children’s futures, and teachers intimately know young people’s academic needs and students are who we serve.
Involving researchers, developers and policymakers from the beginning makes it possible to identify the right opportunities and help design solutions that align with the needs of all students. Then, when a promising innovation takes shape, it’s essential to bring in industry experts and investors who can provide the financial backing for an expansion from a single classroom or school.
Read Chris’ opinion piece with The74 to learn about three key criteria that he recommends teachers, administrators and education leaders should look for when determining whether to introduce new education technology and curriculum into their districts, schools, and classrooms.
Study highlights the importance of foundational decoding skills and their impact on reading comprehension beyond elementary school, offering new insights into how to support struggling readers.
[Oakland, CA] — 10/30/2024 — Despite expectations that students master basic reading skills by third grade, many continue to struggle with reading into upper elementary school and beyond. A recent study commissioned by the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), a national nonprofit pursuing evidence-based breakthrough innovations to improve PreK-12 education, found that grade 3–8 teachers report that 44% of their students frequently have difficulty reading the instructional materials used in their classrooms.
To gain deeper insight into why so many older students continue to face reading challenges, AERDF’s Reading Reimagined program partnered with ETS Research Institute to further study an intriguing relationship between older students’ foundational literacy skills and their reading comprehension, which ETS scientists first identified in a landmark 2019 study. The new findings, released today, elaborate on a key factor contributing to the challenges older students face: the decoding threshold. The new report, The Decoding Threshold: Measuring the Roots of Older Students’ Reading Difficulties: New Evidence, shows that this threshold is a significant barrier to older students achieving reading proficiency.
The “decoding threshold” refers to the point at which students can read text accurately and efficiently, allowing them to independently comprehend grade-level text. It represents a crucial benchmark for assessing student reading ability, as it uncovers a potential barrier to comprehension, as the texts older students are expected to read are increasingly complex. The new analysis indicates that students whose decoding skills are below this threshold struggle with reading comprehension and are often unable to show growth in comprehension, even with continued direct instruction.
“We know that many students nationwide are struggling to comprehend grade-level text after third grade – and this study provides critical insight into why some students are struggling, and where they’re getting stuck,” said Rebecca Sutherland, Associate Director of Research for AERDF’s Reading Reimagined program and a co-author of the report. “If a student is unable to decode longer, more complicated text, all of their attention will be devoted to decoding text, and they won’t be able to comprehend what they’re trying to read. The findings give us a clearer understanding of what supports many older students need to read on grade-level.”
Research Findings: The Impact of the Decoding Threshold
AERDF’s Reading Reimagined program, a research and development initiative focused on ending illiteracy by improving instructional resources, collaborated with ETS to explore the importance of decoding skills in reading development. The report was co-authored by ETS Research Scientist Zuowei Wang, ETS Managing Principal Research Scientist Tenaha O’Reilly, and Rebecca Sutherland, Associate Director of Research at Reading Reimagined, a program of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. The research used ReadBasix®, a reading assessment developed by ETS, to assess students’ decoding abilities and the impact on their overall reading skills.
Why Early Identification Matters
According to the report, identifying students who need help with decoding skills early is essential for providing effective interventions. Without these foundational word recognition skills, students are unlikely to improve their reading comprehension, regardless of how much time they spend in the classroom.
“It truly takes a village to solve the literacy crisis,” said Kadriye Ercikan, Vice President of Research at ETS. “This partnership demonstrates the immense impact we can make when research is combined with actionable solutions. The report highlights the critical importance of identifying students who need help with decoding skills. With these insights, teachers can better target interventions—bringing us one step closer to ensuring every student can read proficiently.”
For students struggling with decoding, targeted interventions that focus on foundational reading skills are critical. That is why foundational reading skills assessments designed and validated to measure older students’ decoding abilities are essential for identifying students who need support in this crucial domain. Students whose decoding skills are strong enough to be past the threshold may still need explicit instructional support in other aspects of reading, such as building background knowledge, vocabulary, fostering metacognition, and developing the critical thinking and digital literacy skills that will allow them to comprehend texts of increasing complexity.
For more information on the decoding threshold, visit AERDF’s website and read the executive summary of the report. For a detailed explanation of Reading Reimagined’s research base supporting its efforts, read the concept paper here.
About AERDF
Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF, sounds like air-diff) is the first national nonprofit dedicated to advancing research and development in PreK-12 education. Inspired by the U.S. federal government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the defense, health, and energy sectors, AERDF pursues evidence-based breakthrough innovations through scientific discoveries and inventions that unlock new capabilities for addressing the most persistent challenges in teaching, learning, and assessment. AERDF’s R&D programs – EF+Math, Assessment for Good, and Reading Reimagined – produce generalizable knowledge that can be applied across the sector, technical capabilities that can be embedded in products and practices, and prototypes that offer adaptable solutions to foster student growth – all helping to catalyze broad improvements in education. By prioritizing Black and Latino learners and students experiencing poverty, AERDF ensures that innovations are inclusive and equitable. Learn more at https://aerdf.org.
About ETS
ETS is a global education and talent solutions organization enabling lifelong learners to be future ready. We advance the science of measurement to build the benchmarks for fair and valid skill assessment. We are committed to powering human progress by promoting skill proficiency, empowering upward mobility and unlocking more opportunities for everyone, everywhere. Our assessment products – including the TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE, and Praxis Assessments – as well as our innovative solutions and subsidiaries help 50 million people each year to clarify their strengths and find opportunities for growth in education, work and beyond. We continue to operate around the world, with offices in 25 locations and operations in 200 countries and territories. Learn more at www.ets.org.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Marvin Smith, Chief of Public Affairs, msmith@aerdf.org
Yasmene Mumby, Communications Director, ymumby@aerdf.org
Seeding scientific discovery and research and development (R&D) for the future of education… I think people get excited about that. They want a better system,” shares Sasha Rabkin, AERDF’s Chief of Program Strategy and Innovation, in a recent conversation with Micah Ward and Matt Zalaznick of District Administration.
An enthusiasm for innovation and research connects education and philanthropy, and Advanced Inclusive R&D can transform that enthusiasm into teaching and learning breakthroughs. “The R&D process is really about filling in the scientific discovery gaps. It offers the opportunity for innovation and incubation,” explains Sasha.
By investing in R&D within education, philanthropy can support educators and learners in meaningfully participating in ideation, iteration, and innovation.
Together with educators, learners, researchers, and developers, we can create a thriving education ecosystem where we advance accelerated solutions backed by evidence. Our programs—Reading Reimagined, Assessment for Good, and EF+Math—are proof of this.
Listen to Sasha, Micah, and Matt discuss philanthropy’s place in education research and development.
Every student is a powerful learner capable of success in math. And, every student brings core innate assets into the classroom: cultural wealth, lived experience, and executive function skills. EF+Math, AERDF’s inaugural R&D program, shares what its teams have learned over several years of research and development to improve math learning outcomes for Black and Latino students and all students experiencing poverty.
“By developing executive function skills in a math context, students are building their overall cognitive capacity for math learning and problem-solving. This new understanding helps us progress as a society towards the day when all students are mathematically equipped to solve the world’s most challenging problems,” explains Matthew Feldmann, Vice President of Product at MIND Education and member of EF+Math’s MathicSTEAM R&D Project Team.
Teams are working to co-create math learning experiences that allow students to bring their assets into the math classroom, so their brilliance is celebrated throughout their learning process.
“Executive function is… being cognizant about how you’re thinking about problems… We want all of our students to be good problem solvers… That means to go against one of the narratives in math education, which is to go fast. The CueThinkEF+ platform, instead, says ‘you’re presented with this word problem, let’s break this into four steps–let’s explore, plan, and then solve,’” explains Dr. Aris Winger, associate professor of mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College and member of EF+Math’s CueThinkEF+ and Pennesota R&D Project Team.
At the heart of Advanced Inclusive R&D is creating and implementing an inclusive, equity-centered approach that blends the expertise and talents of students, educators, researchers, and developers to tackle education’s most pressing challenges.
“The curriculum and program we have now has undergone changes from the very beginning. We go through iterative cycles of design and implementation, find impact, and engage teachers and students to refine the program. And we now have a program that is 16 activities long,” highlights Lourdes Acevedo-Farag, Ph.D student at the School of Education of UC Irvine and member of EF+Math’s Fraction Ball R&D Project Team.
Watch the video to hear directly from the teams about the promising progress they’re making in math education!
The third installment in our EF+Math blog series is a feature on the collaboration between the CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota R&D team. We are interested in partnering with schools and school districts who would like to use the CueThinkEF+ digital mathematical problem-solving platform!
Please sign up and check the EF+Math box here.
Introduction to CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota
Together, CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota form one of three R&D teams in the EF+Math portfolio that is continuing to develop and study our core hypothesis: The integration of EF skill development in math learning approaches that address conceptual understanding and complex problem solving, in ways that afford equitable experiences in math learning, can dramatically increase students’ math outcomes. Each of the R&D teams in EF+Math’s portfolio uniquely address the intersection of executive function (EF), mathematics, and equity. The learnings from each team’s approach contribute to testing EF+Math’s hypothesis and inform continued research and development in this intersection.
Watch short videos about each of EF+Math’s R&D teams for more information.
The visual below demonstrates the complementary nature of each approach in the EF+Math Program’s portfolio.
CueThinkEF+ and Pennesota are engaged in a groundbreaking collaboration. They are focused on building technical capacities and assessments, and are redefining how we approach mathematical problem-solving and executive function (EF) development. Implicit in CueThinkEF+’s theory and approach is the idea that students’ EF, metacognition (the ability to plan, monitor, and reflect on your own thinking), and math perceptions (involving math identity, math beliefs, anxiety, and self-efficacy) are all crucial factors in their success in problem solving. The CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota project represents an equity-centered, inclusive approach to leveraging AI capabilities that honor student brilliance, support learner and teacher needs, and move the math education field towards more equitable educational experiences.
The Promise of CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota: Integrating Equity-Driven EF Supports and Ethical AI Across Problem-Solving Phases
CueThinkEF+ is an innovative application focused on improving math problem-solving and collaboration skills; the system has embedded scaffolded supports for executive function and metacognition skills so that students can progressively use these skills effectively in solving problems. At the heart of CueThinkEF+’s approach is a four-phase method designed to support effective student problem-solving: explore, plan, solve, and review.
CueThinkEF+ makes students’ mathematical thinking visible by allowing students to move back and forth across these stages to tackle complex problems, using prompts to start their thinking in the “Plan” phase, or selecting different tools to represent their thinking in the “Solve” phase. While the structure of each phase intends to build students’ habits of mind in breaking down non-routine tasks, CueThinkEF+ recognized that to truly empower learners, they needed deeper insights into how students engage in problem-solving activities – and where they may need additional support.
That’s where the Pennesota team comes in. The Pennesota team embeds just-in-time EF and metacognition supports in the CueThinkEF+ system through AI-driven learning detectors and probes to understand student behaviors and provide personalized interventions. They are able to mine the rich student data – text, visuals, audio, and interaction log data – emerging from the CueThinkEF+ platform to build these detectors.
These technical capacities include:
- detectors of self regulated learning (SRL) activity that provide a more nuanced understanding of student engagement and EFs while practicing mathematical problem-solving
- in-the-moment assessment of student annotations to support them in providing peers with high-quality feedback on their mathematical problem solving
- probes that gather in-the-moment data, about students’:
- engagement and mind wandering in math digital learning environments.
- self-efficacy beliefs and how confident they are in their ability to solve the math problems facing them
- pathways through problem solving as they reflect on their strategies and decide to keep or change their plans
With the data collected through these tools, CueThinkEF+’s platform can tailor EF and metacognitive supports to students, providing the right supports to the students who need them, at the right moment in time to be most effective for their learning. The combination of machine learning with deeply inclusive human-driven product development is an example for the sector of how to create AI-driven products that foster student agency and reasoning. Further, the platform allows teachers to access data about student learning in meaningful ways to inform their instruction.
Moreover, the teams have been vigilant about algorithmic bias, ensuring that the AI-driven components of CueThinkEF+ do not perpetuate inequities. When developing their detectors, which pick up on language and behaviors in the platform, the team intentionally trains their AI tools with culturally and racially diverse samples of student data and regularly checks for bias. By maintaining strong relationships with partners in school districts, the team gains invaluable insights into the contexts and systems where the platform will be deployed.
To Learn More, Watch The Product Demo
CueThinkEF+ supports learners in developing problem-solving schemas and provides support to exercise student agency and deepen their metacognitive skills. Early research suggests that students who repeatedly used the CueThinkEF+ platform improved their problem-solving abilities. Results from additional early efficacy studies indicate positive correlations between product usage and problem solving accuracy, as well as with students’ mathematical identities and beliefs.
Further, the team is finding new relationships between metacognition, EF, and affect in predicting problem-solving success (Rhodes, et al., 2023)1. We are looking forward to the results of ongoing research to further understand these correlations. We invite you to explore this recent blog from Dr. Rick Bryck, co-Principal Investigator of CueThinkEF+, regarding the role of EF in mathematics and specific examples of the strategies and tools CueThinkEF+ has incorporated to provide scaffolded EF supports that can help all students solve complex math problems .
Rhodes, S., Bryck, R., Gutierrez de Blume, A. (2023). Exploring factors influencing success in mathematical problem solving. In T. Lamberg & D. Moss (Eds.), Proceedings of the forty-fifth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2) (pp.92-105). University of Nevada, Reno.
The Power of Inclusive R&D
What sets the CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota project apart is not just its technological advancements, but the equity-centered, inclusive approach which underpins its development.
Co-design has been at the core of CueThinkEF+’s process, bringing together Black and Latinx students, and students of all races experiencing poverty, along with educators, researchers, and developers to ideate and revise platform features. This collaborative effort ensures that the platform centers the needs of the people who will use the CueThinkEF+ platform – students and teachers. Empowering students to be able to shape their educational experiences is essential, and the process of co-design creates feedback loops between product developers, researchers, and their users that provide transparency and accountability around the development process for all involved.
Further, positioning students from historically marginalized communities at the center of curriculum design processes is necessary to ensure that the resulting products are reflective of cultures and values that are often ignored, making them more relevant and engaging for all students. Students and teachers feel like active partners, not just receivers, of the tool – and are collectively building knowledge regarding how students learn that can inform curriculum development at large.
The CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota team use the CEATL framework to guide the co-design process:
Dr. Aris Winger, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College, has been an instrumental member of the CueThinkEF+ team in developing their process for engaging with students and teachers and facilitating co-design sessions. Dr. Winger remarked,
“It has been transformational for me as an educator and a person to take part in and witness a space where teachers and students of color can honestly give their perspectives about what they need from the application to improve their experience in mathematics. Moreover, watching the team receive their feedback, work diligently to apply it to the application, and bring it back to the users culminated, for me, an authentic process that gives me hope for a new way of improving mathematics applications to serve all of our students and teachers. “
The fruits of these co-design sessions are evident in the platform. For instance, students helped design an animated helper that supports metacognitive reflection by prompting learners to “Stop and Think” during problem-solving. The students workshopped language for prompts the animated helper could pose throughout the platform phases that were engaging and useful – significantly improving the usability and accessibility of the program.
The Road Ahead
The CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota project represents a thoughtful integration of AI into education—one that enhances rather than replaces human interaction and agency. By blending machine learning capabilities with deeply inclusive, human-driven product development, CueThinkEF+ offers students opportunities for collaboration and discourse while providing teachers with actionable data about student learning.
This approach acknowledges that mathematical problem-solving, while crucial, can be challenging to prioritize within teaching routines. CueThinkEF+ not only supports students in understanding problem-solving structures but also empowers them to exercise agency and deepen their grasp of mathematical concepts.
Looking to the future, CueThinkEF+ & Pennesota are individually and collectively expanding their platform and technical capabilities to iterate upon existing metacognitive supports based on recently collected data; they also aim to improve teacher features that can help all teachers build their capacity for equitable instructional practice through using the platform. Leveraging AI in intentional ways can offload the cognitive load for both students and teachers so that they can engage deeply in rich mathematical discourse and reasoning activities essential for student success.
For educators, school leaders, researchers, and product developers alike, the CueThinkEF+ story offers valuable lessons. It demonstrates that when we leverage AI capabilities in service of students’ mathematical brilliance and teacher needs, we can create tools that truly move the needle on educational experiences.
As we stand at the intersection of technology and pedagogy, projects like CueThinkEF+ light the way forward—showing us how collaborative innovation, rooted in empathy and equity, can transform learning for all students. We are thrilled for the CueThinkEF+ team as they recently announced their acquisition by Imagine Learning. It is exciting to know that millions of students will be able to benefit from CueThinkEF+’s AI-driven innovative math learning solutions that support equitable and engaging math learning for all learners. In a world where the discourse around AI often veers into concerns about replacement and depersonalization, the CueThinkEF+ project stands as a beacon, illuminating the potential for technology to amplify human connection, creativity, and growth in our classrooms.
The New York Times interviewed Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, an Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) program, about how the national movement to rethink reading has largely left out a generation of older students who are behind in literacy — and who will not recover without extra help.
If a child’s ability to decode words never reaches a certain level, it becomes extremely unlikely that their reading comprehension will advance, this recent ETS Research Institute landmark study found.
About 40 percent of children in America could fall below that level, says Rebecca Kockler, whose team is studying the issue with Stanford University Graduate School of Education researchers. She called the statistic “jaw dropping.”
Some students never received robust phonics instruction in elementary school. But even those who did may be able to break down a word like “cat,” while struggling with more complex ones like “education.”
In this playbook we’ve gathered resources that we found helpful as we’ve engaged in Advanced Inclusive R&D. We also share example work by the AFG community—learners, researchers, educators, developers, organizers, activists, caregivers, leaders, and school administrators who are collaborating on community-based educational innovation.
Too often in schools, Black and Latinx learners are left out of the process of developing educational tools intended for them. The best tools should be available to meet the needs of every learner, and be designed with and for educators, learners, and caregivers who are most impacted day to day, in and outside of classrooms.
This playbook is a guide that highlights processes for building products and programs based on a radically different approach to what inclusion should mean. In this playbook we’ve gathered resources that we found helpful as we’ve engaged in Advanced Inclusive R&D. We also share example work by the AFG community—learners, researchers, educators, developers, organizers, activists, caregivers, leaders, and school administrators who are collaborating on community-based educational innovation.
We offer readers a sneak peek into our processes—at the same time that we are developing them—so that we can all learn and grow as we strive for a better educational future for each and every child. Whether you’re a researcher, educator, school leader, or someone who is curious about R&D, we think you’ll find value in the processes we describe, the principles we embody, and the examples we share.
Read our Innovation Playbook here!
RAND and AERDF released a new report examining teachers’ perspectives on what is needed to help older K-12 students with reading. The data in this report is a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade 3–8 teachers across all subjects.
Key findings include:
- Almost three-quarters of teachers in grades 3–8 say that they need access to more resources to identify and support students with reading difficulties.
- According to teachers across all subjects, students spend more than half of their class time reading and writing.
- These grade 3–8 teachers estimate that 44% of their students always or nearly always experience difficulty reading the written content within their instructional materials.
- Among teachers in grades 3–8, 40% hold misconceptions about how students develop word reading skills, and nearly half of teachers in these grades report that their primary source of knowledge about reading instruction comes from their personal experiences in the classroom.
The full report is available here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3358-1.html
About the Report:
This study was supported by the Reading Reimagined program of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) through funds provided to RAND. AERDF is a national nonprofit dedicated to advancing research and development in PreK-12 education. Founded in 2021, AERDF pursues positive, multigenerational change by unlocking scientific discoveries and creating innovative solutions that improve teaching, learning, and assessment systems within education. For more information on Reading Reimagined please visit https://aerdf.org/programs/readingreimagined.
The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of Reading Reimagined or AERDF.
We know that every kid can learn to read. The burden is on our system to figure out why 70 percent of kids aren’t reading on grade level. Are our teachers being trained to succeed in kindergarten through 2nd and 3rd grade? Are school systems using instructional resources based on research? asks Rebecca Kockler, Executive Director of Reading Reimagined, one of our Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) programs, in this Education Week article.
Read more here.