SBIR Phase II: Effective Digital Tool for Spanish to English Language Transfer

This SBIR Phase II project will fully develop and market a digital language tool previously found effective in helping non-native English speakers acquire language skills. It was found in SBIR Phase I that students using the tool improved their test scores both absolutely and relative to their peers. Spanish-speaking students learned more effectively when given native-language educational tools in multiple subjects. Competing educational tools are not designed to help those who are natively fluent in Spanish transfer their skills to a new language. Consequently, more than 40% of non-native speakers drop out. If successful, this project will bring to a wider market an existing educational product (created by a small, minority-owned business and already in use nationwide), and improve the educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of non-native English-speaking students in both language arts and the scientific disciplines core to the National Science Foundation?s mission. Moreover, because schools face significant financial pressure to improve student achievement and because the product is competitively priced, it will be shown to be commercially viable, and a plan will be developed to expand the market for the tool outside of the state of California where it was initially studied. An expanding body of research has shown that language learners perform better on standardized tests when they can transfer their ability in another language (Spanish) to the acquisition of English. However, existing tools have not yet met this market need and focus instead on English-only instruction optimized for students who already speak natively. This project proposes to fully develop and market an existing language-acquisition platform found to be effective during pilot research in a large California school. SBIR Phase II research will address outstanding hypotheses suggested by Phase I results, and determine whether the tool can be easily adopted by stakeholders. Specifically, the impact of assignments chosen by teachers will be disambiguated from the use of the tool more generally, and the impact of English-only versus bilingual scaffolding will be studied in more detail to tailor the product to individual use cases. During Phase II, the product will also be integrated with existing academic systems and analytical software, and competitive per-seat pricing will be developed such that it can be marketed first within California and then nationwide by a network of resellers. A successful product will be measured by its effectiveness in closing the gap between native and non-native English speakers, at scale. 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.