The National Science Foundation’s DRK-12 program has awarded a $2.7 million grant to Sadhana Puntambekar, Sears Bascom Professor of Educational Psychology. In collaboration with Rebecca Passonneau and ChanMin Kim at Penn State University, Puntambekar will develop a sociotechnical system to support middle school students’ reasoning and explanation writing in science. The project will use two complementary mechanisms to support writing explanations in science: automated assessment and feedback to students using natural language processing techniques, and feedback to teachers provided through aggregated data about students’ writing generated by the system. The feedback students get from the system and from teachers will be integrated within a framework of distributed and synergistic scaffolding in which support from the technological innovation and scaffolding from the teacher will complement each other. As a Professor in the Department’s Learning Sciences area, Puntambekar has been a pioneer in efforts to integrate technology into science classroom learning.