SBIR Phase I: Within-test measurement of learning progress: unbiased assessment towards bridging the educational opportunity gap

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to help underprivileged students obtain higher education, leading to more than 150,000 highly-qualified specialists by 2035. In a rapidly changing civilization, one cannot predict which professions and skills will disappear in the next decades and which new ones will emerge. This makes an individual’s existing skill level less informative than their potential to acquire new skills. Unlike existing assessment methods, which focus on finding already skilled individuals, this project will help identify those better at obtaining new skills.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will create an assessment algorithm as well as an online testing platform to address the current lack of fairness and equity in high-stakes cognitive and educational assessments. This will be accomplished by combining two innovations: (i) measuring the growth of learning capabilities directly during an educational intervention without separation into pre-test, post-test, and training phases; and (ii) maximizing the rate of change of a student’s cognitive capabilities by applying adaptive item selection and personalized feedback. These two innovations will maximize both the effect of intervention and the accuracy of its measurement. As a result, learning capability can be measured in a single relatively short session comparable to the time typically allocated for standardized testing. The Phase I goals of this proposal are (i) demonstration of feasibility of extracting learning capabilities, (ii) increased signal-to-noise ratio, and (iii) elimination of the imbalance in initial proficiency levels.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.