ImpactEd Evaluation received a top award this week in the global Tools Competition, as one of 50 winning teams building or expanding learning tools to address pressing issues in education.

ImpactEd Evaluation will receive $150,000 to support the School Impact Platform, a tool which is used to help schools and organizations to generate better evidence about what works for learners—specifically in their context. A key challenge facing learning science is variability, and what works is not the same everywhere for all learners. The School Impact Platform addresses this, enabling educators to trial and track the impact of initiatives in real time. In parallel, this data is opened to the learning science research community, creating a unique school-generated dataset on effective educational interventions. The award will unlock the wider research potential in ImpactEd Evaluation’s dataset.

Owen Carter, Executive Director, ImpactEd Group:

“We heard from schools time and time again that meaningfully understanding the impact of where they were spending their time, money and energy was really challenging, so the Platform makes that easier. It provides access to high quality measures of social and emotional skills, alongside pulling data from school systems on things like academic achievement or school attendance, producing live reports and making it easier both for schools to build their evidence base of what’s working and also for the learning science research community to access that data as well”

ImpactEd Evaluation was selected from more than 1,900 submissions, with winners hailing from institutions and organizations across 18 countries and all continents. Awards were given in six tracks, targeting core opportunity areas for innovation. ImpactEd Evaluation received an award in Facilitating Learning Science Research track, which was run in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Jacobs Foundation.

Other winning tools include AI-powered simulators for teachers-in-training, chatbots that help build self-directed learning skills and prevent student dropouts, and data sets for researchers studying what works in education.

Read more about our winning proposal here.

A full list of winners and their projects can be found here.  

Tools Competition Background

The Tools Competition is one of the largest edtech competitions in the world. It aims to spur edtech innovation leveraging digital technology, big data, and learning science to meet the urgent needs of learners worldwide.To date, the Tools Competition has awarded $17.5 million to 130 edtech innovators across four cycles. The 2023-24 Tools Competition was run with support from: Renaissance Philanthropy, Griffin Catalyst, Walton Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Siegel Family Endowment, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Ballmer Group, Calbright College, Axim Collaborative, Jacobs Foundation, Endless Network, and OpenAI. The competition is administered by The Learning Agency and Georgia State University.

The next cycle will launch in September 2024. To be updated on news and events, join the mailing list here.