One Half Year Increase in One Month with Reading Assistant

• August 25, 2010 by Melissa Agocs

The Marion County Schools in West Virginia were interested in evaluating the impact of the Reading Assistant software on readers who had demonstrated “partial mastery” on their state assessment. The software was used within an intensive summer school program.

In the summer of 2009, prior to entering the fifth grade, these selected students worked for 30 minutes a day on Reading Assistant, three to four days per week, for four weeks.

The Scholastic Reading Inventory, abbreviated as SRI, was used as a pre and post measure. The assessment is a research-based, computer-adaptive reading assessment for Grades K–12 that measures students’ level of reading comprehension and it reports Lexile scores. At this age, average readers typically gain 100 to 120 Lexile points after a full year of instruction.

In the video, the graph presented shows the gains the students made on the Scholastic Reading Inventory, significantly improving their Lexile scores from 537, shown by the blue bar, to 605, shown by the red bar. In this one-month summer program, participants gained 68 points, more than half the expected yearly gain of 100 to 120 points. 

For more information, please see the Educator Briefing on this study as well as any of our 200+ additional reports on Fast ForWord software results. If you have questions about any of our research studies, please contact us.

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Categories: Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic proficiency, academic success, accelerate learning, assessments, elementary learning, elementary school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores