Amid sweeping changes and growing uncertainty in the education sector, one truth remains clear: our nation’s learners are counting on us to deliver on the promise of a transformative education—one that opens doors to opportunity and possibility.
Each day brings new developments, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, deeper insights into the science of reading, and innovative approaches to supporting students. Yet, at the same time, we face a crumbling federal education infrastructure and a troubling shortage of evidence-based solutions capable of driving real progress in learning outcomes.
Recognizing the critical needs in our nation’s schools, the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) was created to set a higher standard for the instructional solutions that reach our educators and students. We seek out novel approaches that can fundamentally change the future of education rather than pursuing linear, incremental innovation that is likely driven by immediate market opportunities in the EdTech arena.
Since our launch, we have pursued some of the nation’s most pressing PreK-12 teaching and learning challenges or “opportunity areas” that are ripe for new discovery at the edge of existing knowledge. Our R&D programs bridge scientific research with real-world application, from problem analysis and identification, to product design and testing, to product development and evaluation.
At this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, among the over 10,000 leaders in education, technology, and business discussing the current innovations in learning and workforce development, AERDF showcased our latest learnings and inventions across math, literacy, assessment, and AI-augmented teaching.
Below, we take you through those recent developments. Our R&D programs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in education, each at a different stage of development but all designed to catalyze advancements in teaching and learning.
Assessment for Good: Assessment in Service of Learning
With a focus on the important transition period from ages 8-13, Assessment For Good (AFG) aims to transform assessment so that it delivers accurate, meaningful data that ignites instruction and provides a holistic picture of learning. Teachers make 1500 decisions a day based on information gleaned from lots of sources: observations, student feedback, and standardized testing data that comes too late and well after the school year has ended, not at the speed of teaching and learning.
AFG is exploring ways we can assess students while they are actively learning and deliver that data immediately.
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 more, states across the nation are thinking about how to understand and support each student holistically, to make sure they have all of the skills they need for secondary and post-secondary success.
Assessment has the potential to provide educators, learners, and their families these insights, but current practices provide only a part of the picture and focus almost exclusively on subject matter mastery. This lack of coherence means teachers, learners, or their families aren’t equipped with the most evidence-informed way to support the academic learning for each individual learner.
Since 2022, AFG and its R&D partners have been working on a new breed of assessment that is more about opportunities to learn than about getting an answer right and wrong.
Through the AFG program, we have created assessments that help clarify academic standards and present them in a more useful way for educators.
We are striving to provide educators with each learner’s customized picture of post-secondary success as early as day 1 of 3rd grade. AFG’s prototypes include a comprehensive assessment tool where students receive a dynamic profile that provides a continuous view of learner progress across 30 developmental skills that power learning and matter the most, given where they are in their holistic journey.
These game-based assessments have been used and refined over the last year and a half with R&D partners from Mississippi to Illinois to New York. Not only are these scientifically founded assessments, but they are powered with updated approaches to measurement and understanding growth.
In 2024, AFG built an innovative technical capability that used generative AI as a tool to inform and accelerate assessment development.
Nearly 1,000 assessment items or survey questions were co-created with learners to ensure they reflect learners’ unique skill development and their strengths. Rooted in AFG’s scientific framework and multiple rounds of subject matter expert review, AI generated assessment items were accepted, rejected, or revised for inclusion.
In six months, AFG was able to increase the bank of assessment items by 167%, far faster than if they had continued to generate them all by hand.
This technical capability can enable teachers to create high-quality assessments that are both customized to their specific students and classroom needs and backed by scientific knowledge and human expertise.
It also can now be deployed within AFG’s other assessment products to customize assessment at scale or used by other researchers eager to explore assessment focused on students’ strengths or assets.
Through creating capabilities like these, AFG hopes to make assessment development much more feasible and efficient – providing a more modernized approach to getting to assessment that is in service of learning, a key tenet of The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study.
This body of work represents the potential for an exponential increase in our capacity to provide individualized, real-time assessments that power student learning.
EF+Math and Fraction Ball: Enhancing Mathematical Understanding through Play and Embodied Learning
EF+Math aims to dramatically improve math outcomes for students in grades 3-8 by exploring different ways to strengthen and support the executive functioning skills that help students focus their attention, thoughts, emotions, and behavior while improving how they learn math.
Their current three R&D teams, Fraction Ball, MathicSTEAM, and CueThinkEF+, are generating evidence-based solutions demonstrating that positive math learning experiences that support students’ conceptual understanding and allow students to leverage their executive function skills can improve math outcomes for all learners.
Fraction Ball, part of EF+Math’s portfolio of R&D teams, is an innovative program that reimagines how students learn fractions by combining physical movement, play, and mathematical thinking in uniquely engaging ways.
The Fraction Ball team addresses the challenge of teaching rational numbers like fractions and decimals, a crucial step to successfully advancing in math learning. With an emphasis on play and collaboration, Fraction Ball improves students’ understanding of rational numbers and increases joy and happiness in the learning process.
Designed at the suggestion of teachers at El Sol Academy with Dr. Andres Bustamante and his team at UC Irvine, Fraction Ball integrates fractions into the three-point arc and smaller arcs on the basketball court, creating a hands-on, engaging way for students to understand fractions.
The court includes both fraction and decimal representations, helping students visualize their equivalence.
With funding support from EF+Math and in partnership with 3 districts in Southern California, including a foundational relationship with the Santa Ana School District, Fraction Ball has grown to now engage approximately 5,000 students across 33 schools. The team has also engaged with communities in two other countries to continue developing and studying the role of Fraction Ball in supporting students’ math learning experiences.
Five years of experimental studies with thousands of students, have shown moderate to large positive impacts on students’ rational number knowledge outcomes.
Further, evidence shows that participating in Fraction Ball has moderate impacts on students’ emotional experiences by increasing their positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions felt when doing mathematics.
Fraction Ball is one example of EF+Math’s work to co-create and implement math learning experiences that allow every student to effectively leverage their innate assets, including executive function skills, identities, and cultural wealth, to improve math outcomes for all learners.
Reading Reimagined and Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR): Illuminating Reading’s Hidden Hurdle
New research reveals that many upper elementary and middle-school learners struggle to sound out complex, multisyllabic words and comprehend grade-level text–skills essential for learning. Reading Reimagined aims to end illiteracy by researching and designing classroom-ready solutions that support the linguistic and developmental needs of older elementary students who are not reading at grade level and need to develop foundational reading skills.
Reading Reimagined has brought together partners from Stanford University Graduate School of Education and the Achievement Network (ANet) to test an assessment tool in schools that can help educators identify older students struggling to read.
Their partnership has pioneered the implementation of an effective and efficient assessment tool that accurately measures reading skills in older students: Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR).
Stanford’s ROAR tool is:
- Free: the assessment is available at no cost.
- Accessible: ROAR is a self-administered assessment that can be completed online by students within 15 minutes, without requiring extensive training or resources from teachers.
- Effective: ROAR is one of two validated reading assessments for students across grades K-12, becoming one of only four approved assessments to assess students for risk of reading difficulties in California.
- Quick and efficient at scale: ROAR offers a fast and reliable way to assess students’ foundational literacy skills on a large scale, helping educators track reading ability and progress across grade levels.
ROAR has been validated through several studies, demonstrating a strong correlation with scores from traditional standardized reading tests, like the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test, and gold-standard one-on-one evaluations across diverse student populations, in a fraction of the time.
ROAR is used in over 180 schools and organizations nationwide. It’s approved as a statewide reading screener in California for grades 1 and 2, Minnesota for grades 4 through 12, and Ohio for grades K through 12.
Moving forward, researchers are working to expand ROAR for multilingual learners which would allow students to be assessed in all languages they speak, providing a more comprehensive understanding of their reading skills. As a result teachers will be able to better understand student strengths and areas of need, and provide more precise instructional interventions.
AugmentED: Reimagining the Role of the Teacher for the Age of AI
Our newest R&D program, AugmentED, is working towards ushering in a future where AI enhances and supports human teaching, rather than replacing it.
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. AugmentED will assemble teams and networks of expert teachers, AI engineers, and computer science and education researchers to co-create new models for teaching and learning for the age of AI and highly effective AI-powered tools that support these new models.
Teams will seek student feedback on their solutions, measure whether they boost student progress, and iterate based on what they learn.
With the potential for transformative impact on both teaching practice and student outcomes, AugmentED aims to create an education system where technology amplifies the irreplaceable human elements of effective instruction while preparing students with the skills they’ll need in an AI-driven world.
AugmentED will focus their initial R&D efforts on high schools, tackling both specific subject areas, such as ELA, and durable skills such as critical thinking and communicating with evidence.
Igniting Discovery. Readying for Scale.
At AERDF, we seed the ripe environment to shape and accelerate nascent, promising, and underexplored ideas into research-backed, ambitious teaching and learning solutions primed to grow and scale within three to five years.
Our pioneering R&D model bridges scientific research with real-world applications by co-designing solutions with educators, students, and caregivers alongside researchers and developers. This approach strengthens the success of the solutions produced because they align with the classroom needs of students and teachers.
Bending the arc to breakthroughs
- What is driving the future of our society?
- What future do we want?
- What discoveries do we need to realize it?
- What research will impact learners?
- What inventions are better for learning?
- What policies & pedagogy are better for learning?
Our unique model ensures that the voices of those closest to educational challenges shape solutions, and our iterative piloting allows for continuous refinement, as we build and improve prototypes in real-world settings.
As Dr. Temple Lovelace, executive director of Assessment for Good, shared:
Why not AERDF? As a former academic, I was always enamored with being able to ask big questions, being able to ask audacious questions, being able to ask questions to the depth that is deserved. In many places we don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the breadth of understanding of what’s going on. AERDF provides the ability to be able to do that in a very targeted way. Why not AERDF, given the big challenges we have facing us in education?
