Harris School's BIP Lab Awarded $500,000 Federal Grant to Scale AI-Powered Early Learning Innovation

The Behavioral Insights and Parenting (BIP) Lab at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy has received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to develop the Chat2Learn Suite, a tool combining researcher-developed conversation prompts and illustrations with an on-demand AI chatbot to foster high-quality language interactions between young children, parents, and teachers.

The award comes through the Department's new From Seedlings to Scale (S2S) program, part of IES's Accelerate, Transform, and Scale initiative. The S2S program represents the first federal effort to apply the ARPA model to education sciences, funding high-risk, high-reward projects with potential for breakthrough impact.

"We are honored to be part of the first S2S cohort," said Ariel Kalil, Daniel Levin Professor of Public Policy and co-director of the BIP Lab. "The ARPA model has fueled transformative advances in many domains. Bringing that ambition to education represents a major shift."

Chat2Learn addresses a pressing problem: the large number of low-income children who enter kindergarten behind in language and foundational skills. A six-month randomized control trial (RCT) of the Chat2Learn model found significant effects on children’s vocabulary growth (effect size approximately 0.37 SD), and treated parents reported increased confidence in their children's ability to learn. In a lab experiment with parent-child dyads from subsidized Chicago preschools, parents with Chat2Learn access produced higher-quality language input and spent more time jointly engaged with their children.

The Phase I S2S award will support the entire BIP Lab project, including field-based research to develop the full Chat2Learn Suite for preschool and kindergarten classrooms serving low-income families, in partnership with Chicago-based charter schools and Head Start networks. The Suite will integrate classroom and in-home components to support teachers in embedding open-ended conversation into daily routines, increase parental conversational engagement in the home, and strengthen parent-teacher communication by enabling teachers to assign prompts and share conversation snapshots. 

If successful, the project may advance to subsequent S2S phases focused on scaling and evaluation. The BIP Lab team includes developmental psychologists, economists, and data scientists, with collaborators at Texas A&M and Harvard who contribute expertise in early childhood intervention and measurement of child skill development.