Corgi: Enhancing Middle School STEM Learning

Project Description

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

Project Website
corgi.cast.org

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.