THIS SBIR Phase I project's broader/commercial impact is to raise the bar for the educational technology industry and for K-8 classrooms. While classrooms today generally make do with a collection of unrelated applications, this project provides a coherent, cohesive suite of apps that squarely support the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as well as the Next-Generation Science Standards. In addition, the technology which will power the suite of apps will enable students to collaborate even when they are not located in the same place, both writing onscreen and talking together. This kind of distance collaboration and sharing of information are important features of 21st century literacy skills and eventual workforce readiness. With the accompanying professional development materials and the step-by-step guides designed to support educators in using the materials in their classrooms, this project is well positioned to be adopted nationwide.
The project addresses a pressing, national need to improve reading skills amongst children in grades 3-8, especially in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The strategy is to use low-cost, Internet-connected, mobile computing devices ? technology that children find exceedingly engaging as well as increasingly available ? as the anchoring platform upon which to build a collaborative learning environment. This project will support writing to read, writing for an audience and writing collaboratively, three strategies that have been shown to produce positive gains in both reading and writing skills. More specifically, this project will offer a complete suite of tools that will enable the target population of students (grades 3-8) to read mentor texts (professionally-written examples of quality nonfiction writing), to collaborate with peers in a safe, engaging environment, to create multi-media projects that develop both verbal and visual literacy skills, and to publish and share their work over the Internet. The impact of these activities on the amount and quality of student engagement in reading, writing and collaboration activities will be empirically assessed. To better prepare teachers to use this project, educators will be provided with curricular and professional development materials.
StarWalk Kids Media has developed a software tool known as the StarWalk Writer™ with support from NSF SBIR Phase I Award No. 1415774. The StarWalk Writer works in conjunction with our existing StarWalk Reader™ streaming platform and related library of 520 educational eBooks, creating a single, collaborative Learning Environment (CLE). This CLE platform, designed for students in Grades 3 to 8, supports multiple students working together simultaneously, accessing, reviewing, gathering, organizing and citing research data and images for the purpose of discussing and collaborating (in real time) to create and publish written documents. The software package, which will be available beginning in January 2015 for schools to purchase for the 2015/2016 school year, will also support educators by providing curriculum support materials, individual and group assessment rubrics, and LMS compatibility. Producing well-crafted explanatory and argumentative writing using evidence is a challenging task for many students, and teachers often lack the resources, tools, and opportunities to integrate this kind of writing into instruction. Since our eBook collection includes many exemplary mentor texts, we decided to build a fully Collaborative Learning Environment, integrating three specific types of interactivity proven to help children develop literacy skills: Writing to Read, Writing for an Audience, and Writing Together. Although it was designed to make learning and teaching reading in complex nonfiction subject areas like science and social studies more effective and exciting for upper elementary and middle school students, the StarWalk Writer™ also shows great promise as a practice environment for the new generation of standardized tests, which will be administered online for the first time in the spring of 2015 in most states. These new testing protocols will require students as young as third grade to read online, take notes while they read, and write constructed responses based on passages they have read and notes they have taken — all at the computer keyboard. Teachers whom we interviewed in our market research are not aware of any existing tool where students can practice these skills online. While the applications for the StarWalk Writer™ are much broader and more fundamental than preparing for standardized tests, educators’ urgent need to practice for the tests represents an opportunity for rapid market acceptance of this product. A research study conducted this Fall with the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology (EDC) found that students in classrooms using the StarWalk Kids eBooks along with the StarWalk Writer™ software wrote essays that scored somewhat higher on average than did their peers in classrooms that not use the StarWalk Writer™ software. Importantly, the largest difference in students’ final essay scores was in the most high needs school where only 19% of students are "proficient" in reading. Additional Findings: Students and teachers found using the StarWalk Reader and eBooks along with the StarWalk Writer to be highly engaging, and teachers reported students were fully invested in the study task throughout the 5-day study period. Users reported that using the StarWalk Kids eBooks and the StarWalk Writer™ tools together made it easier and quicker for students to gather evidence in the form of both text and pictures. Students liked the collaborative process and felt they benefitted from monitoring and learning from each other’s writing. According to one fourth grade participant, "What I learned about myself as a reader and writer during this project was working as a team you can accomplish much more. I know this because as a team we worked harder and quicker." The Read-Aloud feature was highly valued by both teachers and students. Teachers commented on the value of having narration for students with lower reading levels, engaging all participants and facilitating collaboration because all students are able to contribute to the writing. Students commented that they liked the Read-Aloud function because they could listen and take notes, speeding up the research process. The small classroom implementation study of the StarWalk Writer™ prototype was conducted in October–November 2014 by StarWalk Kids Media and researchers from the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology (EDC) in three public schools in the New York City metropolitan area. The study included approximately 130 boys and girls in grades 4–8. The purpose of this research was to investigate the feasibility of using a collaborative writing tool with elementary- and middle school-aged youth to help them produce persuasive essays using information from nonfiction texts as evidence. Each school participated for 5 days, with two study conditions in each school: one class that used StarWalk Kids eBooks along with the StarWalk Writer and one class that used StarWalk Reader eBooks only. All students were tasked with writing a persuasive essay, using text and images from a preselected set of texts in the StarWalk Kids eBook library as evidence.
