School Readiness
Create strong foundations for early learning.
Courtesy of ANet
Tech-enabled products, along with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), hold promise for enabling more adaptive and responsive learning experiences, though their impact on student learning varies greatly depending on implementation quality.
Over the past five years, Overdeck Family Foundation has invested over $52 million in studying and scaling tech-enabled products that have shown potential to impact student outcomes at scale. These include curricula based on standards‑aligned high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) in both math and English language arts, which help educators address growing variance in students’ abilities, as well as formative assessment products that integrate existing curricula and provide real-time data to educators.
12 grantees supported
Unlocking Innovation
Technology to make formative assessments more actionable and impactful.
Overdeck Family Foundation has funded tech-enabled formative assessments since 2022, hypothesizing that these are critical tools for delivering on the promise of truly personalized learning.
It makes intuitive sense that teachers who know more about their students’ academic abilities can help them learn more effectively. Yet it is often challenging for educators to accurately assess individual student competencies and misconceptions. Tech-enabled formative assessments address this challenge by capturing nuanced data on how each student answers questions and performs on tasks, and what their final answer or product looks like, subsequently making that information actionable to educators. Further innovations in technology and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may not only help capture this information in real time, but also analyze it and provide targeted guidance on how to use the insights, enabling educators more easily offer just-in-time support and scaffolding.
ASSISTments, a formative assessment platform primarily for grades three through eight, leverages AI to provide immediate feedback to students on their math assignments.
Courtesy of ANet
ASSISTments has seen that students most in need of help benefit the most when their teachers use the platform. In one randomized controlled trial (RCT), researchers from SRI found that, after one year of using ASSISTments, seventh graders improved 0.18 SDs on math achievement, which translates into approximately six to seven months of learning. Students scoring at or below the median in math achievement prior to using ASSISTments saw impacts of 0.29 SDs, or almost a year of learning in math. A second RCT, conducted by WestEd, replicated these results, finding an impact of 0.10 SDs on students’ math achievement at the end of eighth grade, one year after ASSISTments use. Perhaps even more impressive, the researchers found that ASSISTments had the largest impact—about 0.22 SDs or seven months of learning—in schools with a higher proportion of economically disadvantaged students.
Having access to high-quality assessment data, and support for using them, can improve educator practice and student outcomes. But few tools exist that help teachers more accurately and effectively understand what their students do and do not know.
Achievement Network (ANet), a national provider of professional learning, coaching, and assessments, has found promising evidence of impact on teaching and learning.
An RCT conducted by researchers at Harvard University found that having access to ANet’s assessment platform doubled the amount of time teachers reported reviewing and using data. In schools that the research team assessed as having a high readiness to implement the platform, these impacts also trickled down to students. After two years of implementation in this subgroup of schools, ANet’s assessment approach yielded improvements in students’ math (0.18 SDs) and ELA (0.12 SDs) achievement. At the same time, null effects on student achievement in schools that had lower readiness to implement ANet’s approach highlight the critical role that school culture and leadership play in creating a data-driven culture where assessment can deliver on its goal of boosting achievement.
But even when tools provide useful insights and actionable guidance, they can be burdensome to administer.
Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), developed by the Yeatman Lab at Stanford University and reaching over 137,000 students across the country, makes foundational literacy assessment quick and easy.
The fully digital and validated K-12 diagnostic platform is administered virtually and provides automatic scoring in real time, delivering precise, skill-level data on measures like decoding and phonological awareness in under five minutes per measure. It can also be administered in group settings, unlike other tools, which have to be implemented one-on-one, further easing implementation.
As the evidence grows, we’ve strengthened our belief that tech-enabled formative assessments, especially when paired with high-quality instructional materials and aligned professional development, can help address urgent challenges teachers face in the classroom, leading to improved instruction and student outcomes. To further validate our hypothesis, we’re currently funding several initiatives that test the impact of integrating technology and AI into assessments, with results forthcoming.
Unlocking Evidence
Research to identify the impact of edtech products and the implementation conditions necessary to see that impact at scale.
Over the past five years, Overdeck Family Foundation has invested in research that identifies the potential impact of high-quality edtech products and the types of implementation conditions that are necessary to realize that impact at scale. Here’s what we’ve learned:
- Scaled impacts of edtech tools depend on strong classroom implementation. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Zearn at-scale in a large urban Texas district found causal impacts of ~0.11 SDs on math achievement as measured by NWEA, likely because the district required teachers to use the tool at the recommended dosage of three lessons per week in the second study year. Impacts were null in the first year of the study without implementation policy. Complementary quasi-experimental research done in Louisiana found that Zearn had larger impacts on student math achievement, about 0.20 SDs, when paired with strong implementation support.
- Technology is likely most effective when it complements—rather than substitutes—core instruction. A large-scale RCT led by researchers at Stanford using data from Russia found that introducing a moderate amount of computer-assisted learning (approximately 45 mins per week) did improve student learning outcomes, but spending too much time on edtech (approximately 90 mins per week) replaced more traditional learning and yielded diminishing, and sometimes negative, effects. Findings from studies like these underscore that technology delivers the strongest impact when blended with, rather than substituting for, high-quality instruction.
- Appointing designated staff to explicitly focus on supporting edtech use may be one avenue towards enhancing edtech usage and impact. In experimental research conducted in India, researchers found that having a full-time staff person on-site at each school to support implementation led to dramatic improvements in usage of Khan Academy and increased student achievement by about half of a standard deviation.
- Greater usage is associated with greater impact for some edtech products. In a new study of Quill.org, researchers found that student growth in writing skills almost doubled when students completed at least 20 lessons (extended dose) compared to fewer than 10 lessons (partial dose). More work is needed to obtain a causal impact estimate.
- Tech-enabled assessment tools hold promise for boosting student achievement. Causal evidence on ASSISTments found that when teachers had clear, real-time information on student skills and misconceptions, they could provide supports that improved standardized test scores in the short- and longer-term, with particularly large benefits for students from under-resourced schools.
- Pairing high-quality assessments with rigorous curriculum may be key to impact. ANet pilot data, collected in partnership with a Florida school district, found that teachers who received targeted support on connecting high-quality interim assessment insights to their instructional materials saw students outperform peers on achievement tests by up to 14 percent.
Unlocking Growth
The scale of tech-enabled curricula with demonstrated evidence on student outcomes.
Supporting Teachers To Enhance Students’ Reading and Writing Skills
CommonLit’s free digital text library and CommonLit 360, its full-year English language arts (ELA) curriculum, bring together high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials, embedded assessments, and curriculum-based professional learning in a single platform. Designed to provide a coherent, yearlong literacy experience, CommonLit 360 integrates rigorous grade-level texts with reading, writing, speaking, and listening instruction; embeds formative, benchmark, and performance-based assessments into daily practice; and offers sustained, job-embedded professional development to reduce planning burden, strengthen teacher confidence, and build strong ELA departments over time. This comprehensive approach has been shown to be associated with positive student learning outcomes and increased student engagement.
CommonLit grew from serving 1,352 schools in 2021 to 3,273 schools in 2025, reflecting steady year-over-year growth in revenue.
In addition to focusing on growth over the past five years, CommonLit has invested in strengthening its evidence base to ensure that use of the curriculum results in meaningful student outcomes. An ESSA level 3 study of 45,181 sixth through 10th grade students in 313 schools across 40 states during SY 2021-22 found that in classrooms where teachers used CommonLit 360, students saw faster growth in reading—equivalent to about 2.1 months of additional learning—than students in comparison group classrooms (who did not use the curriculum or used it at negligible amounts). CommonLit has also been awarded an EdReports “all-green” rating, indicating it meets all quality and usability expectations, including alignment to standards.
Over the past four years, Overdeck Family Foundation’s general operating and capacity-building support have enabled CommonLit to enhance its product suite, leverage artificial intelligence to build internal data capacity, develop a growth plan, and launch an external validation on the impact of CommonLit 360’s program on ELA achievement in sixth through eighth grade, with findings anticipated in 2027.
Number of Paid Schools Served by CommonLit
CommonLit has grown its reach in paid schools by 142 percent since 2021.
Improving Learning and Teaching With AI-Powered Tutoring
Created by experts, Khan Academy’s library of standards-aligned practice and lessons covers math, grammar, science, history, and more. Recent peer-reviewed research examining a sample of over 200,000 third through eighth grade students across a three-year period found evidence that usage of Khan improves learning outcomes, with students who used the platform for 30 minutes per week increasing in math achievement by about 0.085 SDs per year. Overdeck Family Foundation’s research staff calculates that this translates into an additional one to three months of learning, depending on the student’s grade level.
Khan Academy reached 1.485 million licensed learners in SY 2024-25.
In March 2023, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, designed to help improve learning and teaching—for teachers, it serves as an AI assistant that supports lesson planning and student feedback; for students, it acts as a one-on-one tutor, guiding them through materials and exercises. District interest in Khanmigo inspired Khan Academy to design a new classroom learning experience that integrates Khanmigo into the Khan Academy platform with a focus on making Khan Academy more intuitive to use and getting more students to the level of practice that leads to learning. At the same time as it invests in innovation, the organization is dedicated to monitoring user engagement and academic progress to gain a deeper understanding of its impact on student learning and the potential of AI-supported learning. This new experience was piloted with select partners this year and will be rolled out to all Khan Academy District partners and grassroots teachers for SY 2026-27.
Overdeck Family Foundation has provided general operating support to Khan Academy since 2013, which has assisted the organization in continuing to grow its district program and innovate, develop, and test its technology-driven products, including Khanmigo.
Note: Licensed learners are students who use Khan Academy via Khan Academy Districts, also known as the U.S. district partnerships program.
Number of U.S. Students (Licensed Learners) Who Are in the Khan Academy Districts Program
Khan Academy Districts’ reach has grown 57 percent over the last three full school years, and 12 percent year-over-year since January 2025.
Scaling an Evidence-Based Math Program to Elementary Schools Across the Country
Zearn Math supports mastery of grade-level math for all students through independent digital lessons, instructional materials, student performance insights, and training and implementation support for educators.
It is used by one in four elementary-school students and more than one million middle-school students nationwide.
A 2025 randomized controlled trial conducted by RAND estimated the impacts of Zearn Math in third through fifth grade in sixty-four schools in Texas serving high proportions of economically disadvantaged, Hispanic, English-learner, and below-proficient students. Researchers found small positive, but not statistically significant, effects of Zearn Math on the Texas standardized math achievement test (STAAR), and a statistically significant impact of 0.11 standard deviations—equivalent to about four percentile points—of Zearn Math on the MAP, an adaptive assessment of math achievement used by the district. Notably, there was a large difference in usage of Zearn between year one and year two of the study period, suggesting Zearn could have larger effects when used at the recommended level of three grade-level lessons per week.
A separate quasi-experimental study conducted by Johns Hopkins University examined the impact of Zearn Math Supplemental on students’ math achievement when paired with dedicated implementation support. Researchers used propensity score matching to estimate the impacts of Zearn Math Supplemental on fourth through eighth graders’ math achievement across three Louisiana school districts, finding impacts of about .20 SDs on students’ math learning. Exploratory, non-causal analyses revealed that students who completed more on-grade-level lessons showed higher math achievement at the end of the year, regardless of treatment group.
Overdeck Family Foundation has funded Zearn’s work since 2018. Our support for the organization has allowed it to strengthen the quality, implementation, and innovation of its digital curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade, while increasing its ability to measure impact at scale.
