SBIR Phase I: Technology for Individualized Pathways to Reading

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This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will advance the state of the art in interactive reading instruction, fundamentally reorganizing it to respond to the needs and strengths of the individual learner, and to support the classroom activities of each teacher. Almost two thirds of U.S. 4th graders score below proficient in reading. Given that early reading ability is a major predictor of academic achievement across all subjects, improved reading instruction would have a tremendous positive impact on many lives and on the country as a whole. This project aims to harness the power of the tablet platform in new ways to bring new flexibility and transparency to the process of learning to decode the written word. To achieve this, the project will develop and evaluate a prototype of multi-component software capable of adaptive assessment, instruction and practice. The project's R&D is aimed toward the eventual widespread use of products that can help each child be ready to meet the literacy demands of the curriculum, and level the playing field in subjects such as science where nonfiction reading plays a growing role. The project's core innovation is a new, fine-grained way of modeling each child's reading knowledge. This model represents a new answer to the question of what information a phonics tutoring system needs to maintain in order to provide optimally individualized instruction. The project will develop ways of tracking the progressions by which individual students come to understand spelling patterns and recognize them in words, with particular attention to how students make use of similarities and differences between words. The project will map additional word characteristics such as familiarity, complexity, regularity, ambiguity of spelling, and resemblance to known words that influence a student's readiness to learn and master new words, from initial engagement up to fluency. Additional project work will develop and evaluate the logic of tutoring decisions, investigate ways to gamify the process of learning to decode written language, and demonstrate novel ways of integrating software use with other activities in a classroom's balanced literacy program.