SBIR-STTR Award

This SBIR Phase I project will advance understanding of how game-based methods can be effectively used to help schools bring social emotional learning (SEL) instruction to all students. The end goal of this SBIR project is to create and test a game-based intelligent social tutoring system (ISTS) that both assesses and improves the behavioral readiness and social emotional (SE) skills of Kindergarten and 1st grade (K1) students. SEL is a critically important component of early education for all students, and efforts to bring SEL to the nation?s vulnerable early learners would be particularly impactful, especially in helping to foster equity in academic achievement. The proposed system will guide early learners to learn, and then practice SEL skills in controlled, engaging social simulations. This will provide schools with an easily administered, scalable tool to fill a niche for which there is considerable market pull. In addition to addressing significant societal and market needs, research findings from this SBIR will be used to more broadly inform the efforts of the game development community. As a first step in this R&D effort, this SBIR Phase I project will (a) develop a game prototype consisting of six game-based scenes designed to assess essential SE skills linked in the literature to school readiness and positive behavioral functioning for young students (e.g., Emotion Regulation, Empathy, Impulse Control); (b) conduct game prototype test groups with K1 students to assess the usability and acceptability of the game as well as gather independent parent ratings and behavioral observations of children's SE skills; (c) develop prototype educator dashboard materials for administration of the SEL game with students, including resources to reinforce and extend SEL beyond the game; and (d) conduct a test of the game and dashboard prototypes with teachers and other educators who represent likely purchasers and/or users of the product with students to assess the feasibility and potential value of the proposed product.

This SBIR Phase II project aims to create and test a game-based intelligent tutoring system that both assesses and improves the behavioral readiness and social emotional skills of Kindergarten and 1st grade students. Research has shown that early intervention for children with social skill deficiencies is critical for success in the classroom and success in life. Children from vulnerable, underserved social niches are particularly likely to be 'less ready' for school, including those who experience poverty, family instability, and trauma, each of which disproportionately impact children from racial and ethnic minority groups. The game being developed by this project empowers educators to provide that much needed social emotional learning support for their young students. First, it provides an affordable, feasible, and scaleable means for identifying the social emotional needs of young students as they transition to formal schooling. Second, it enables educators to quickly translate this formative assessment data into personalized, digital intervention that can be applied with K1 students on a much broader scale than is possible with traditional, in-person services. And lastly, because this innovation is game-based and fun, students are more likely to fully engage and fully benefit from the embedded instruction. This project will advance understanding of how an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) can be used effectively to help educators provide social emotional instruction to all students. Within academic domains such as science and mathematics, many successful ITS implementations have employed learning models where answers to problems and the knowledge being evaluated can be easily represented. However, traditional ITS techniques have not been as effective in domains like social emotional learning, where the connection between what a student does and what the student knows is less well-defined. This project will develop several significant innovations for ITS that apply to social and emotional learning, but may also be useful in other, less well-defined learning domains. These innovations are represented by our adaptive Student Model and Tutorial Manager which collectively enhance student learning via personalization, pacing, and engagement. As more student data is collected, the student model will become increasingly accurate, leading to more intelligent choices from the tutorial manager to better enhance the social tutoring of our innovation and thereby, student learning. In addition to addressing significant societal and market needs, research findings from this SBIR will be published to more broadly inform the efforts of the ITS community. 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.