In fiscal year 2023-24 (FY 24), from July 2023 through June 2024, there were 43 innovation disclosures, and the University of Oregon filed for 28 new patents. There are 29 existing startups with formal ties to the university. The UO saw an innovation income of $7.7 million.
But there is more to the UO’s innovation story than these figures alone. The university entered into 10,384 total copyright, trademark, and patent licenses in FY 24—many of them generated by researchers in the College of Education.
“The productivity of College of Education faculty in the innovation space is a true competitive advantage compared to our peers,” said Christine Dixon Thiesing, associate vice president of Industry, Innovation, and Translation, the unit that assists researchers in commercializing intellectual property. “The funding their licenses and products generate support development of the next generation of innovations enables them to be generous in offering free trainings and support. They go beyond by truly supporting social, emotional, and behavioral health of kids in schools.”
UO Faculty Have Been Measuring Education Effectiveness for Decades
One of the flagship assessment tools developed by researchers at the UO is easyCBM, nationally recognized as a leader in learning assessments. The system includes a variety of reading, Spanish language literacy, and math assessments to screen K-8 students at risk of falling below grade-level expectations, as well as sensitive measures to monitor progress over time.
“easyCBM gives teachers a system for monitoring kids’ progress, particularly those with disabilities, to measure program effectiveness and if it’s not effective, determine how it could be changed,” said Gerald “JT” Tindal, emeritus professor of education and director of Behavioral Research and Teaching (BRT).
Before the development of easyCBM, many teachers across the country were devising their own systems of measurement to monitor student progress. But the variation from one teacher to another made it difficult to track learning gains year to year. That is, “If you want to measure change, you can’t change your measures,” he said. “This system has 50 years of research to back it up.”
“This product was developed because educators were asking for it,” said Raina Megert, BRT research coordinator of finance and operations. “Screening for risk to figure out which kids may not be meeting benchmarks, identifying skill gaps, and finally measuring student progress—these are some of the reasons teachers were excited about this product.”
Tindal added that BRT researchers worked with the local school districts to directly integrate feedback from teachers in the development of easyCBM.
BRT has also developed two other assessments in the CBM suite: CBMSkills and WriteRightNow. CBMSkills assessments measure students’ skills in discrete content rather than cutting across compilations of skills and provide teachers with diagnostic information to pinpoint specific skills students have mastered and need to master. WriteRightNow makes it easy for teachers to provide individualized writing feedback for all students, particularly those with special needs and English learners. Automatic scoring and a feedback library expedite grading and encourages students to engage in meaningful revisions.
easyCBM, launched in 2011, is the culmination of decades of longitudinal research and is now used by 250,000 elementary and middle school teachers across the nation with more than one million students. It has generated more than $8 million in revenue that has been reinvested directly in the research and development to improve and expand the CBM suite in BRT.
For school districts that cannot afford district-wide licenses, BRT makes individual classroom licenses available, as well as offering a free version of the software.
“Making learning public and transparent is the key to effective teaching” Tindal said. “There is so much individual variation in classroom learning that it’s no wonder teachers are overwhelmed. As kids go through the grades, this variation in learning becomes even greater. Therefore, it is important to navigate this situation publicly, allowing teachers to work together. These assessment tools provide transparency and accountability at the kid level. Ensuring that kids learn can’t happen without public, transparent openness about what it is that we are measuring and what it is that kids are learning.”
Reinvesting Innovation Revenue into New Research
A significant portion of the licensing revenue is reinvested into the research and serves as bridge funds in case of federal funding shortfalls.
“Years ago, some units within the college established a royalty reinvestment agreement,” said Kent McIntosh, Philip H. Knight Chair of special education. “We as authors of the applications take no royalties from them. Instead, they pay for staff salaries, tech support, and infrastructure. We’re more collaborative because no one is just trying to make their name. People are here because they want their work to make a difference.”
McIntosh is the director of Educational and Community Supports (ECS), another CoE research unit that is responsible for developing Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), an evidence-based, tiered framework for supporting students’ behavioral, academic, social, emotional, and mental health. ECS also developed the School-Wide Intervention System (SWIS), which helps schools track behavior incident data and make active, data-driven decisions.
“PBIS is essentially a startup education company that has been around for 30 years,” McIntosh said. “Most startups want to become the next Google or get bought out by Google. Ours is different: We have an academic research mission to generate new knowledge. We have data from 3 million students across every state in the country and multiple territories. That gives us an incredible opportunity to learn and share, allows us to do more than anyone else.”
PBIS is a free tiered approach of organizing supports for students in schools and has been continuously funded by the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs for more than 27 years. Currently one in four US schools use PBIS.
Tier 1 practices and systems establish a foundation of regular, proactive support while preventing unwanted behaviors. Schools provide these universal supports to all students, school wide. Tier 2 practices and systems support students who are at risk for developing more serious problem behaviors before those behaviors start. These supports help students develop the skills they need to benefit from core programs at the school. At Tier 3, students receive more intensive, individualized support to improve their behavioral and academic outcomes. At this level, schools rely on formal assessments to determine a student’s need.
SWIS, which is a tool to implement the PBIS framework, helps more than 5,000 schools around the country track school discipline data to pinpoint their sources and therefore aid in a wide array of interventions—for example, making sure kids are getting enough to eat or practicing a calming routine—to help students back in the classroom faster. Beyond its use for aiding in individual behavior tracking, it can also be used to determine whether discipline is disproportionately affecting specific groups by race, ethnicity, gender, and disability.
“SWIS helps us look for patterns,” McIntosh said. “Saying that Carly is a problem child is not useful. Instead, by using SWIS we can determine that Carly is receiving discipline referrals at the beginning of the school day for defiance in the classroom. She seems to struggle with this on Mondays and Fridays. We can put our problem-solving hats on and ask what we can do to change the environment to make it more supportive for Carly.”
SWIS brings in more than $3 million a year, but all of that is reinvested into further developing the tool. McIntosh said SWIS a more trustworthy product because profitability isn’t the goal—helping children succeed in school by improving the learning environment is.
“The University of Oregon College of Education has a long tradition of innovation that is deeply rooted in research,” said Laura Lee McIntyre, dean of the College of Education and Castle-McIntosh-Knight professor. “Our faculty are dedicated to creating positive change in our education systems; supporting students, families, and educators; and addressing inequity. The nearly 50 products that come out of our research and outreach units are a testament to this commitment, and I’m proud that our work is making an impact in Oregon and beyond.”
— By Kelley Christensen, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation