Advanced Education Research & Development Fund

Ef+math is our inaugural r&d program exploring how strengthening students' executive function skills can help students manage their thoughts, emotions, and behavior while they learn math. With a focus on mathematical conceptual understanding and complex problem-solving, ef+math seeks to create innovative approaches to teaching and learning math that help all students thrive. Ef+math created a new field at the intersection of executive function and math learning; published 70+ research articles, and created an extensive student dataset of 10,000+ for ongoing research. The ef+math supported inventions demonstrated statistically significant gains across 113 schools and 33 districts through three of its prototypes. They are supported by a cross-sector community of 700+ educators and researchers (continued on schedule o) who've engaged 18,000 students across 42 districts.

Assessment for good is our r&d program that seeks to transform assessments. With a focus on the important transition period from ages 8-13, assessment for good is developing assessments that deliver accurate, meaningful data that guides instruction and fosters a more student-centered experience at the speed of teaching and learning, rather than as a retrospective audit. Assessment for good pioneered a new approach to assessment that measures the skills learners apply to power their learning, including metacognition, collaborative problem-solving, and adaptive thinking, plus technical skills, like the mechanics of reading, invented new analytical approaches (a "new math" of assessment) to make sense of the complex data from this new approach to assessment, providing information about (continued on schedule o) each learner when educators need it and solutions that support self-directed student learning. And while using cutting edge machine learning and artificial intelligence, assessment for good reduced traditional assessment question (or item) development by 75% and expanded the pool of items by 167% in six months. The organization developed four new interactive assessment interfaces that introduce conversational (or dialogic) assessment through text chats, fundamentally shifting from traditional testing to natural learning exploration, engaging over 15,000 learners so far.

Enteprise provides programatic support to its programs by acting as a backbone in support of the entire research operations. Enterprise provides centralized support in areas like procurement management, compliance with funder regulations, freeing researchers to focus on their work. Additional operational support comes from the provision of shared resources, such as a dedicated it infrastructure for secure data collection, legal suport to ensure informed consent and maintain participant privacy, a human resources department to manage staffing and talent acquisition for program teams, and a communications office to handle external dissemination and stakeholder engagement.