Research Projects

NIER (NSF Educational Innovation Research) The NIER project, funded by the National Science Foundation, represents an ambitious initiative to develop a comprehensive platform that integrates educational research with practice, addressing the longstanding challenge of translating research innovations into measurable improvements in educational outcomes across diverse learning environments. Traditional approaches to education research often remain isolated in academic settings, with limited pathways for practitioners to access and implement validated innovations, while researchers struggle to test their innovations in authentic educational contexts that provide meaningful data about real-world effectiveness. MyGooru serves as the foundational infrastructure for this research-practice exchange, providing tools for practitioners including learners, instructors, administrators, and mentors, while enabling researchers, developers, and content creators to validate their innovations and scale successful approaches to broader educational communities. The implementation involves creating a comprehensive ecosystem where researchers can configure their innovations within MyGooru's technical framework, recruit participants through transparent consent processes, gather rich implementation data about effectiveness across multiple dimensions, and submit validated innovations for inclusion in the platform's resource library with comprehensive metadata about implementation requirements and outcomes. Early results demonstrate the platform's effectiveness in accelerating the research-to-practice pipeline, with researchers gaining unprecedented access to authentic learning environments for innovation testing, practitioners benefiting from immediate access to research-validated interventions, and educational institutions achieving measurable improvements in learning outcomes through evidence-based personalization approaches. Success factors include MyGooru's sophisticated data governance protocols that protect participant privacy while enabling rigorous research, the platform's ability to support diverse research methodologies while maintaining systematic approaches to innovation validation, and the comprehensive stakeholder engagement tools that enable coordinated support for learners while generating valuable research insights.