The Concord Consortium

10/07/2026

“Is what we are doing working? How do we know?”

Nearly twenty years ago, rubrics helped Danielle Woodman Kehoe answer these questions as a first-time instructor. Today, AI is opening new possibilities to reimagine learning and assessment.

As Danielle celebrates one year as the Concord Consortium’s first Director of Development, she reflects on what she’s hearing from national education funders and partners about the future of learning—and how our team of researchers, engineers, and learning scientists is working with educators to meet this moment.

https://concord.org/blog/assessment-in-the-age-of-ai/

What does AI mean for the future of learning? Danielle Kehoe reflects on what funders are saying—and how Concord is helping shape what comes next.

09/18/2026

Can middle school students use machine learning to investigate real-world Earth science questions?

This summer, Concord Consortium researchers and curriculum writers worked with teachers in Anchorage, Alaska, to co-design a new curriculum for our NSF-funded SeismicML project. Together, they explored how students can use machine learning to analyze authentic seismic data and pursue questions about their local area.

Read about what we learned from the co-design process—and how teachers are helping shape meaningful, inquiry-based experiences with AI and Earth science.

https://concord.org/blog/co-designing-machine-learning-investigations-for-earth-science-inquiry/

Concord Consortium researchers and curriculum writers worked with teachers in Anchorage, AK, to co-design a new curriculum for our NSF-funded SeismicML project.

09/15/2026

Senior research scientist Amy Pallant has shaped the vision and direction of Earth system science education at the Concord Consortium for two decades: helping students move beyond learning science as a collection of settled facts and inviting them to reason through complex, open-ended questions about the Earth.

Pallant has helped students explore big questions with innovative simulations that allow them to conduct their own inquiry into Earth systems using the same practices as Earth scientists.

Read more about Amy’s journey and our team’s work to transform Earth science education here:

Senior research scientist Amy Pallant has shaped the vision and direction of Earth system science education at the Concord Consortium for two decades.

09/10/2026

We’re hiring! We’re looking for an experienced Scrum Master or Agile practitioner who’s also comfortable with quality assurance and release pipelines to help our software teams work together and ship reliable, high-quality products.

At the Concord Consortium, we develop a lot of technology—and our approach is grounded in Scrum methodology.

Learn about our Scrum cycle:
https://concord.org/blog/the-scrum-cycle/

Learn more and apply:
https://concord.org/our-work/careers/scrum-master-qa-engineer/

09/03/2026

We're hiring! 🚀

The Concord Consortium is looking for two people to join our software engineering team — a Scrum Master & QA Engineer and a Software Engineer — to help us build STEM tools used by real students and teachers nationwide.

Hybrid roles based in Massachusetts or remote from CA, MI, NH, NJ, or NY. Competitive pay and benefits.

👉 Scrum Master & QA Engineer: https://concord.org/our-work/careers/scrum-master-qa-engineer/
👉 Software Engineer: https://concord.org/our-work/careers/software-engineer/

Know someone who'd be a great fit? Tag them below!

08/19/2026

With our AI-supported plugin for CODAP, learners who are blind or have low vision can engage in independent data inquiry. Based on a user’s typed or spoken query, the plugin can make a graph, and describe both the graph and the underlying dataset.

But what if the description it provides is too long or too short?

Providing the user with the right amount of information at the right time is the Goldilocks problem of AI-powered data exploration inquiry.

With supplemental funding for our National Science Foundation-funded Data By Voice project, we’re researching this challenge and expanding from pilot testing with individual students to classroom tests in Massachusetts and surrounding areas.

Learn more: https://concord.org/blog/expanding-access-to-data-exploration-with-ai/

08/06/2026

More than 3.5 million learners have used CODAP to explore and analyze data—but few know the engineering story behind it.

Principal Software Engineer Kirk Swenson shares what it took to rewrite CODAP from the ground up—and how Claude AI helped carry 30 years of design into a modern codebase.

We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF), Valhalla Foundation, the Cisco Foundation, and the generous individuals who supported this incredible effort.

Take a look behind the scenes of the four-year project to completely rearchitect CODAP.

https://concord.org/blog/under-the-hood-of-the-new-and-improved-codap/

07/29/2026

Can an AI tutor respond appropriately to student actions in an interactive science simulation—not just what they type? 🤖🔥

That was the challenge Leslie Bondaryk, Doug Martin, and Teale Fristoe tackled at the STEPs Hackathon, hosted by /dev/color, with support from the Gates Foundation.

Our team connected our Wildfire Explorer simulation to an AI tutoring platform so it could respond to what students were doing inside the simulation. They also showed that the same approach could be adapted to other sims.

Read how they worked through the problem—and what they learned:
https://concord.org/blog/stem-inquiry-ai-at-the-steps-hackathon/

Thank you to /dev/color, Nancy Otero, the Gates Foundation, Dr. Shima Salehi, Stanford University’s IDEAL Learning Lab, and all participating organizations for the opportunity to collaborate.

Can an AI tutor respond appropriately to student actions in an interactive science simulation—not just what they type? That was the challenge Concord

07/23/2026

👋 We’re excited to announce that Kiley Brown has been named Director of Product Strategy at the Concord Consortium!

For more than a decade, Kiley has helped transform innovative ideas into impactful STEM learning technologies by working closely with educators, researchers, software developers, and partners. In her new role, she leads our collaborations with educational publishers, virtual schools, nonprofits, districts, and others to co-design research-informed digital learning solutions.

Learn more about Kiley’s new role—and how we partner to create educational technology that makes a difference.

We’re excited to announce that Kiley Brown has been named Director of Product Strategy at the Concord Consortium!

07/14/2026

We're excited to share our latest work at the International Conference on Teaching Statistics ( )!

Join Concord Consortium researchers as they present innovative approaches to data science education, including a CODAP plugin that supports student learning of statistical concepts and the U.S. K–12 Data Literacy and Data Science Model Learning Progressions.

If you're attending ICOTS, we'd love to connect and continue the conversation about the future of statistics and data science education.

See our presentations: https://concord.org/events/icots-2026/