Annenberg Institute EdExchange
Research
“Bright Matter has been a fantastic partner to the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. We have really appreciated the chance to collaborate with a group of thoughtful and reliable designers and developers who helped make our work better through their strategic thinking, their design support, and their wide-ranging web and media skills.”
Nathan Schwartz | Director of Applied Research and Professor of the Practice
Bright Matter also designed the EdExchange landing page to introduce the initiative and articulate its purpose. Custom icons help illustrate the core challenge: while the demand for evidence-based solutions continues to grow, particularly in schools serving students with the greatest needs, practitioners often face a fragmented research landscape, making it difficult to access connected, actionable insights across domains. The EdExchange addresses this by bridging gaps between initiatives to foster a more collaborative, cohesive community of research.
Demand for Evidence
Disconnected Research
The EdExchange Solution
The Annenberg Institute at Brown University engaged Bright Matter to bring a bold vision to life: connecting its three flagship education research initiatives—EdWorkingPapers, EdInstruments, and EdResearchforAction—to help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners more easily discover related resources across each site. The result was the EdExchange. Bright Matter developed the EdExchange logo, brand, and a cross-site recommendations API that intelligently surfaces connected research across the initiatives, transforming previously siloed resources into a more integrated, discovery-friendly ecosystem.
At the heart of the EdExchange ecosystem is the recommendations API. Bright Matter built a performant, interactive interface that surfaces related resources across initiatives—ensuring that educators, policymakers, and researchers can easily access the most relevant content, right when they need it.
In addition to developing the EdExchange engine, Bright Matter partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown to launch the first EdInstruments Toolkit: Assessing ELA Curriculum Shifts: A Practical Guide for Measurement and Progress Monitoring. Bringing together insights from professional learning organizations and researchers, this resource equips districts with clear, actionable guidance for evaluating and supporting ELA curriculum implementation.
