A faculty-owned business that created a test to assess a teacher’s ability to teach adults how to read was one of four startup companies licensed by the UT Research Foundation in fiscal year 2013.
Psychoeducational Associates—formed by Sherry Bell, Steve McCallum, and Mary Ziegler in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences—markets educational assessment tools, including the Assessment of Reading Instructional Knowledge-Adults (ARIK-A).
ARIK-A is a multiple-choice test that evaluates a teacher’s mastery of teaching reading to adults in five areas: alphabetics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, and reading assessment. It helps inform educators’ professional development so they can better meet the needs of adult readers.
The UT Research Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that commercializes and licenses technology discovered by faculty across the UT system.
In addition to Psychoeducational Associates, the foundation also spun out these businesses:
• Ascendant Global Technology – a company based out of New Mexico working on cognitive disease detection
• LifeCareSim LLC – a Memphis-based company formed by faculty in the UT Health Science Center College of Nursing to market a teaching tool that uses a game-based structure to generate patient scenarios for nursing students
• A Massachusetts-based startup commercializing a battery technology
Overall, the foundation recorded an all-time high of 145 invention disclosures and filed a record eighty-seven US patent applications for FY 2013, according to its recently released annual report. There were twenty-eight US patents issued based on UT technology in FY 2013.
Learn more about ARIK-A online.