The awards bring additional investigators into the AIMS EduData Initiative, further expanding the AIMS Collaboratory. This cycle’s awardees will integrate UpGrade with their application infrastructure to conduct A/B tests, assign participants to different test groups, manage experiments, and collect data on what happens. UpGrade has been used in more than 80 education research studies, reaching hundreds of thousands of learners. The latest awardees will illustrate how digital learning tools can support research at scale while minimizing disruption to authentic teaching.
“We believe the next frontier of evidence-based education lies in the tools students and teachers already use every day”, said April Murphy, senior director of Learning Engineering for Carnegie Learning. “By partnering with edtech platforms to integrate UpGrade’s open source A/B testing infrastructure, we’re enabling researchers to run rigorous, large-scale studies directly within real learning environments — accelerating our understanding of what works to improve learning outcomes at scale.”
The newest grant recipients include:
For a six month period, the two grants enable these platforms to build a sustainable research infrastructure and contribute to a growing movement that seeks to shift research closer to the tools students already use, address challenges that educators prioritize, and speed the incorporation of research insights into well-used curricular resources.
Digital Promise anticipates announcing future grant competitions later in 2026, creating opportunities for more researchers to work with these and other digital learning tools. Visit the AIMS EduData website and subscribe for updates to learn more.
