Corgi-2: Enhancing Middle School STEM Learning

Project Name
Accelerating Higher Order Thinking and STEM Content Learning Among Students with Learning Disabilities (CORGI-2)

Project Website
corgi.cast.org

Project Description

We took what’s already great about graphic organizers and made them more flexible and accessible, by bringing them online and adding lots of built-in tools and supports.

Corgi marks the next generation of graphic organizers, helping students co-organize their learning in a digital, Google App environment. We want to see every student build higher-order thinking skills and become an expert learner.

Research shows that Corgi works. Both our pilot study and an independent evaluation of the Corgi app showed very positive results: Students made significant gains learning science and U.S. history content when using Corgi. Encouragingly, students with disabilities made substantial improvements in the independent evaluation. We’re excited CorgiI helps students learn.

Based on feedback from teachers and students, this project focused on adding the following new features:

• Redesigned landing page
  To build awareness and understanding of tool before account creation
• Differentiated student/teacher accounts and enhanced teacher-side features
  Teachers can customize guides for students by embedding instruction and resources into the Corgi Guide
• Improved user support materials and new onboarding sequence
  Users receive a guided introduction and just-in-time help when needed
• Dynamic review checklist
  Users have an opportunity to review and revise any steps they missed
• Expanded options for sharing and presenting completed Guides
  Improved integration to Google Classroom and Google Slides

These exciting findings and added features have propelled further development of Corgi. We are building more ways to support higher-order thinking skills and STEM learning, as well as new supports for content organization, higher-order thinking routines, and collaboration strategies.

Want to take Corgi for a test drive? Go to corgi.cast.org to try it out and learn more.

Timeline

2018 – 2022

Funder

National Science Foundation

Partners

University of Kansas
SRI International
Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE)

Project Leadership

Jose Blackorby, CAST (Co-PI)
Jan Bulgren, University of KU (Co-PI)

Contact

For questions and other inquiries about this project, please contact corgi@cast.org

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