SBIR Phase II: A secure educational interactive software platform for improving high school student achievement

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This SBIR Phase II project is focused on the challenge of significantly improving student achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) concepts through the development of an innovative video software platform that leverages the benefits of video-based active learning in the educational environment. STEM fields are widely regarded as vital to a nation's economy, but a disconnect exists between the STEM knowledge and skills that students acquire in schools and those that they need to succeed in an increasingly global, technology-dependent workplace. Phase II research will enable development and testing of a video and peer review tool that will merge the core inquiry steps of successful scientists with state-of-the-art video proprietary technology, and allow collaboration between students and teachers located anywhere in the country. Commercialization of this technology will provide school districts with a needed educational tool to help teachers direct and assess STEM activities, and support students as they learn critical thinking skills and master STEM concepts, a mastery fundamental to successful careers in science and engineering. Encouraging the growth of students' STEM competency through this technology will encourage the growth of scientific innovations of the future, supporting domestic jobs and a strong financial tax foundation for our country's economic prosperity. The technical innovation in this SBIR project is an educational video software platform designed as a framework for STEM critical science inquiry, incorporating proprietary source code, student peer review, teacher assessment, analytics, a searchable database, and secure class-to-class video sharing. Each project requires that students work within a framework mirroring the best practices of professional scientists: Students organize concepts in terms of hypotheses, evidence, and analysis, and communicate their evidence-based projects to be peer reviewed. The secure video software platform is designed to be used within high schools and integrated into teachers' existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) to assess student progress. The goals and scope of the research are to develop the interactive video player source code that supports the educational framework and then demonstrate the results of this platform on student achievement utilizing a standardized achievement test. These goals will be accomplished through several tasks focused on software development to incorporate secure account creation, peer-review interactivity, and LMS integration, followed by demonstration of class-to-class connectivity of the platform. A pilot study will assess the software platform?s functionality and validate its potential to significantly increase high school student critical thinking and scientific inquiry measures on a standardized test.