July 10, 2026
Three Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) affiliated scholars were awarded $100,000 from the Tools Competition, the world’s largest education technology competition. LRDC Senior Scientist, Diane Litman, Professor, School of Computing and Information (SCI); and LRDC Center Associates, Lorraine Li, Computer Science, Intelligent Systems Program, and Gayle Rogers, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Chair, English Department, and LRDC Center Associate will use this funding to continue the development and release of their dataset, “A Multimodal College-Level Writing and Feedback Dataset.” The team was selected as one of three winners in the Datasets for Education Innovation Track of the Tool Competition, competing against 150 other submissions.
The dataset consists of multiple drafts of essays from first-year English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students and students in creative writing courses, along with their instructors’ feedback. Future iterations of this dataset will include office-hour audio recordings to best understand how instructor-student interactions impact writing. Overall, this dataset seeks to understand how students develop as writers through feedback and works towards creating a personalized writing support system that students can learn from.
Read more about the team’s dataset here. Learn more about the Tools Competition here. See the Pittwire article on the team's win here.
Written by Amber Eschrich