{
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "updated": "2026-09-09",
  "program_family": "U.S. Department of Education / Institute of Education Sciences — Small Business Innovation Research (ED/IES SBIR)",
  "current_solicitation_context": "FY2026 Phase IA, Phase IB, and Direct to Phase II solicitations closed June 29, 2026; this registry is readiness infrastructure for future solicitations and does not represent an open award opportunity.",
  "source_urls": [
    "https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/small-business-innovation-research-sbir",
    "https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/small-business-innovation-research-sbir/solicitation-information"
  ],
  "candidate_program": "Structural Learning Intelligence / Student Why / Y-Series",
  "gates": [
    {
      "id": "eligibility",
      "label": "Eligibility and ownership/IP clarity",
      "status": "PARTIAL",
      "basis": "ACA LLC is a U.S. for-profit entity, but solicitation-specific small-business, PI-employment, SAM/UEI, ownership, and IP representations require formal verification at proposal time."
    },
    {
      "id": "problem",
      "label": "Educational problem and public value",
      "status": "EVIDENCE_ACCUMULATING",
      "basis": "Student-design evidence, state mathematics data, and peer-reviewed literature are being mapped to a bounded problem statement."
    },
    {
      "id": "novelty",
      "label": "Technical novelty and prior-art differentiation",
      "status": "NEEDS_WORK",
      "basis": "The Student Why architecture is defined conceptually, but a systematic competitive/prior-art comparison is not yet complete."
    },
    {
      "id": "rd-question",
      "label": "Risky or unproven R&D question",
      "status": "CANDIDATE",
      "basis": "Candidate question: whether explicit instructional orientation plus prerequisite reconstruction and conceptual explanation improves target identification, explanation, independent assessment, retention, and transfer."
    },
    {
      "id": "hypothesis",
      "label": "Measurable hypothesis",
      "status": "DRAFT",
      "basis": "Measures are proposed but not yet frozen in a preregistered or approved experiment protocol."
    },
    {
      "id": "baseline",
      "label": "Benchmark / baseline definition",
      "status": "PARTIAL",
      "basis": "Formative learner observations and external state/literature benchmarks exist; intervention-specific pretest/baseline measures remain to be designed."
    },
    {
      "id": "prototype",
      "label": "Prototype and experiment plan",
      "status": "IN_DEVELOPMENT",
      "basis": "Learning architecture is Orient → Why → Connect → Understand → Practice → Demonstrate → Transfer; test protocol is not yet finalized."
    },
    {
      "id": "evidence",
      "label": "Evidence/provenance controls",
      "status": "IMPLEMENTED_PARTIAL",
      "basis": "Canonical evidence registry, lineage, bounded interpretations, RSS projections, and literature registry are implemented in this candidate package; live validation remains pending."
    },
    {
      "id": "reproducibility",
      "label": "Reproducibility and verification",
      "status": "IN_DEVELOPMENT",
      "basis": "Package-level validators and machine-readable registries are present; independent study replication has not occurred."
    },
    {
      "id": "security",
      "label": "Security/privacy/AI governance",
      "status": "IN_DEVELOPMENT",
      "basis": "Public synthesis excludes unnecessary student/teacher/school identifiers; formal research protocols require study-specific privacy, consent, IRB, and data-governance review."
    },
    {
      "id": "commercialization",
      "label": "Commercialization and customer discovery",
      "status": "EARLY",
      "basis": "Student-design and public scholarship activities provide early discovery evidence; school/district customer validation and commercialization metrics are not established."
    },
    {
      "id": "team",
      "label": "Team / PI eligibility and research capacity",
      "status": "PARTIAL",
      "basis": "Research activity and institutional records exist; solicitation-specific PI employment and team requirements must be verified."
    },
    {
      "id": "budget",
      "label": "Budget / subaward readiness",
      "status": "NOT_STARTED",
      "basis": "No solicitation-specific cost model or subaward plan is frozen."
    },
    {
      "id": "compliance",
      "label": "Research security / compliance",
      "status": "PARTIAL",
      "basis": "Governance boundaries exist, but formal study permissions and compliance depend on the future protocol and funding mechanism."
    },
    {
      "id": "crosswalk",
      "label": "Proposal crosswalk",
      "status": "IMPLEMENTED_PARTIAL",
      "basis": "Literature and evidence records now carry ED/IES mapping fields; solicitation-specific narrative mapping remains future work."
    }
  ]
}