Carnegie Learning Only K-12 Finalist for Dept. of Education $1Million XPRIZE

This week, Carnegie Learning announced that the company’s research team, /https://www.upgradeplatform.org/, has been selected as a finalist in the XPRIZE Digital Learning Challenge. UpGrade is the ONLY K-12 education team to make it to the finals. XPRIZE is a global competition to modernize, accelerate, and improve the technology and processes for studying effective learning and education.

The UpGrade by Carnegie Learning team leveraged a new and free open source platform for field experimentation within education platforms. The one-of-a-kind UpGrade platform was developed by Carnegie Learning to help edtech software providers use evidence-based approaches to understand which learning experiences lead to the most effective student outcomes. For the XPRIZE competition, the team runs experiments with UpGrade within MATHia, Carnegie Learning’s award-winning adaptive software for mathematics.

In the XPRIZE pilot phase, UpGrade by Carnegie Learning explored whether students receiving math word problems personalized to include common first names of students in their own schools helped students feel a greater sense of belonging in school and in their math class. The study was motivated by prior research suggesting that a positive self-concept and sense of belonging in students’ learning environments is linked to better academic outcomes.

“We have dedicated decades of research to understanding how students learn best,” said Carnegie Learning Founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Steve Ritter. “To propel students toward continually better outcomes, we know a personalized approach works—no two students learn alike. Working directly with three school district partners across the U.S. enabled us to apply our experiences to best serve the needs of teachers and students in their region of the country. What was most gratifying was the genuine excitement that our school district partners—administrators, teachers, and students—had about participating in research to help us understand the potential of personalized learning.” Photo: Business Wire. Click here for details.