Education Technology 2025: CZI Journey - Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Learning Science for EdTech: Our Work in Education for 2025 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
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 Dec 16, 2024 · 
 5 min read 

 Learning Science for EdTech: Next Steps in Our Work in Education

 Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, discusses our exciting journey into 2025 at the intersection of education and technology.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Sandra Liu Huang 
 
 
 
 
 
 Tags: 
 Education , Technology 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education joins educators in a co-building exercise. 
 
 

 
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 A s 2024 comes to a close, I want to take a moment to reflect on the progress we have made since my note in April about our dedication to applying learning science and co-building tools with educators and experts.

 Over the past nine years, we have been focused on advancing learning science research and application to equip educators better. We’ve partnered with incredible organizations to discover research-backed teaching and learning practices. We’ve made grants to researchers and education organizations to support educators leveraging technology like AI to advance district teaching and learning priorities. We’ve also rolled up our sleeves and built tools to help teachers unlock the potential of every student.

 I’m so proud of these investments and the work of our partners — and they help us better understand what else our sector needs. In my conversations with school district leaders, one need is clear: despite the explosion of digital learning tools over the last decade, the burden lies heavily on educators to piece solutions together in support of their students, whose needs have grown and widened since the pandemic. As an edtech philanthropy, we think we can play a unique role in supporting the edtech ecosystem to incorporate learning science more and to work better together for schools.

 What We’re Building

 In 2024, we continued to work on numerous products to make learning science easier to apply for educators. We improved Along , which we built a few years ago in partnership with educators at Gradient Learning. With educator input, we added the ability to use Along to spark classroom-wide discussion, and we were proud to receive the highly respected SOC2 certification, a benchmark for trust and security in the United States. We built numerous AI-powered tools, including Math Tailor , which assists middle school teachers in generating high-quality practice problems, reviewing prerequisite skills, and adjusting language levels easily on top of Illustrative Math.

 Each product, like Along and Math Tailor, can be useful and even powerful, but we started to see common challenges around each tool (and, we think, most edtech tools) that could benefit from shared technical solutions. We started two new efforts this year to address them:

 First, as edtech developers, we know that rapid 

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