Research to Support EdTech Development
Technology can transform the classroom experience for teachers and students. For example, technology can offer real-time data on students’ learning, provide individualized feedback on problem-solving, and strengthen teachers’ ability to understand student thinking. Despite this potential, effective solutions are difficult to develop and sustain. Great ideas are not always sufficient: The best innovations sometimes fail to adapt to the variability of classroom contexts and student needs.
Our extensive research and development expertise helps develop practical, student-focused, and high-quality products. Our work is primarily funded through SBIR studies and funder-supported accelerator programs.
Our approach involves developing a working model of how a specific solution achieves its intended outcome. This structured model encourages explicit assumptions about a problem to be solved, identifies users, product features, and implementation scenarios — as well as how all of these elements connect — leading to testable hypotheses that our team and partners can rigorously evaluate. Using this approach, we partner with dozens of EdTech organizations to ensure their solutions.
Improving Outcomes for All Students
We provide EdTech developers and startup partners with the learning science, content, and classroom practice expertise they need to transform ideas into effective, research-based solutions.
Our Research Framework
WestEd offers research services for EdTech products at any stage of development. Our Research Continuum shows how research studies can build to establish an evidence base, and our Logic Model Framework shows how a logic model can be used to develop a research plan.
Research Continuum

Our research continuum provides developers with a steady flow of actionable feedback, beginning with usability analyses. Through our work together, you and your teams can receive a steady flow of feedback provided by our menu of research offerings. These can include feasibility analyses, pre-post assessments and measurement, correlational studies, quasi-experimental studies, and large-scale randomized control trials.
Logic Model

Logic Model
Our logic model is built around inputs that inform our activities and lead to a set of outputs that inform short- and long-term outcomes.
Inputs include assumptions about product users and desired functionality that we work together to better understand through needs assessments, focus groups, and expert reviews.
Iterative user research activities include studies to better understand user interactions with products. Outputs include the immediately observable effects of using the product as intended. Related implementation studies can help developers understand usage and guide launch and ongoing success.
Short- and long-term impacts are guided through quasi-experimental and/or randomized control trials that help teams understand user behavior, learning and guide ongoing product development cycles to ensure positive outcomes.
From Our Clients
WestEd has a reputation among school districts for conducting accurate, high-integrity research. In analyzing the test score gains of students using NoRedInk’s writing software, the organization was thorough, diligent, responsive, and professional.
Jeff Scheur, Founder, CEO, NoRedInk
The [EdTech] staff at WestEd are outstanding research colleagues and a pleasure to work with.
Steve Ferrara, Senior Advisor for Measurement Solutions, Measured Progress