Paul Schwarz and David Stevens founded Symphony Learning to research and develop sophisticated educational software interventions. The field of cognitive development has produced many insights into the way children learn. This has resulted in numerous educational interventions that are associated with positive outcomes. Unfortunately these intervention programs have not been made available to the majority of our nation’s school children. Cognitive development intervention programs are complex and difficult to implement on a large scale. David and Paul founded Symphony Learning to leverage technology to make the wealth of knowledge from the field of cognitive development more widely available. Symphony Learning’s first program is Symphony Maths, an elementary school software program designed to help reception and year 1 students develop a foundational understanding of mathematics.

Paul Schwarz has twelve years of experience as a designer and developer of educational software. He has helped to create award-winning software for a variety of companies and institutions including Lexia Learning Systems, Houghton Mifflin, and Harvard Medical School. Paul holds a Masters of Education, specializing in Educational Media Design, from Boston University, and has taught courses in Educational Media Development at the Boston University School of Education and Yale University. Paul believes that educational software should motivate students through appropriate and challenging content that dynamically finds their level of skill. Extensive real-world testing is the most important component of the software engineering process. This is the motivation behind Symphony Learning’s practice of submitting all programs to extensive testing in schools throughout the USA as well as Symphony Learning’s usability testing process with students who struggle in traditional learning environments.

David Stevens is a developmental psychologist who received his doctorate from Harvard University where he specialized in cognitive development and its application to education. David’s research at Harvard focused on cognitive development intervention programs that were associated with dramatically improved educational outcomes. He used his research findings as the basis for a federal grant application that resulted in a $2 million award to develop techniques for applying cognitive development principles to educational software. The motivating vision of David’s work is that learning abilities and educational performance can be improved through the application of cognitive development principles to education. This process is often too complex to be easily carried out by one teacher in a classroom of many children. Educational software can be designed and implemented to make sophisticated interventions more widely available. David is also the founder and Executive Director of the Cognitive Development Center of Lexington.