WordScientists

Early literacy development is an integral part of young learners' educational experience. Not only do they need to learn to read, but they also need to read to learn. Thus, the discourse on early literacy had centered around struggling readers to set them up for success. However, the pandemic has changed everything.

For the very first time, everyone is behind; and all these struggling readers now need to close the reading gap.

WordScientists is committed to solving this problem with online early reading and language intervention programs. In a nutshell, our solution is twofold: We provide 1) Evidence-based early literacy materials and 2) Virtual instructional support sessions. 

We have designed WordScientists with scalability in mind, and it only takes one digital device that has an internet connection to access our solution. This provides thousands of schools and millions of families with opportunities to access quality learning materials wherever they are.

According to UNESCO, 617 million children around the world are not meeting the minimum proficiency level in reading regardless of whether they are in school or not; and this is from the pre-pandemic era. More recently they stated, one year into the pandemic, over 100 million additional children will be held back due to education disrupted with partial or full school closures.

A closer look at the scale of the problem in schools we have worked with during the pandemic gave us an in-depth understanding of the current statistics on the ground. We have witnessed teachers and families, as well as students, struggle as they navigate through the new virtual educational environments. Schools didn't have enough resources to support their teachers remotely and teachers didn't have quality materials to use in their virtual classrooms. Families didn't have the knowledge and skills to help students catch up on their reading skills. And students were struggling to varying degrees, which called for targeted intervention and personalized instruction.

As we start to envision what the post-pandemic era will look like, it poses yet another challenge to learning environments that they need to be equipped with materials and skills for hybrid settings.

WordScientists provides online early reading and language intervention programs, delivered through the internet.

The website (WordScientists.org) offers a reading curriculum for Pre-K to Third Grade students, using a multimedia model to deliver results fast. The contents follow the science of how reading develops and provide the right text at the right time to boost reading outcomes. Each activity comes with explicit and systematic instruction for educators as well as multiple strategies for differentiated instruction for personalized interventions.

Design-wise, it is built for collaboration. Teachers and families can share the instructions and practices, which ensures continuous learning for all students. Teachers can also make a seamless switching between virtual and in-person classrooms, taking advantage of existing technologies including computers, smartphones, tablets, and printers.

To boost effectiveness and scalability, WordScientists also provides instructional support sessions for both classrooms and families. While traditional approaches with on-site reading specialists can directly support tens of students at most, virtual sessions with WordScientists’ literacy specialists can support hundreds or thousands of students at the same time by empowering teachers and families to be self-sufficient with our resources.

In order to close the reading gap in young learners (age 3-8), WordScientists specifically targets adults who support them on the frontline—teachers and families in the United States and around the world.

Our target population has one commonality: Young learners who are struggling to learn to read, thus needing to close the reading gap before it's too late. However, so many of the teachers and families lack adequate training to teach reading as well as quality teaching materials for the learners. The pandemic has deteriorated the situation as they have to tackle all the challenges in remote and hybrid settings. 

We have been working closely with four schools in the United States, four schools in Kathmandu, Nepal, and a school in Lebanon to understand what they need exactly and how we can best serve them. With the live expert sessions, we have been able to provide families with personalized interventions for individual students as well as support for teachers with customized instructional plans. Currently, we are constantly improving our resources including upgrading the website design based on user feedback.

Specifically, WordScientists has achieved the followings since the 2020-2021 School Year:

• Increased reading and language proficiency for struggling students.
• Provided customized intervention plans for individual teachers.
• Implemented adapting pedagogy for students.
• Introduced teaching materials for both remote and in-person environments.

Insufficient literacy has drastic consequences at the level of the economy of a country, let alone individual lives. Thus, WordScientists strives to contribute to equitable classrooms by providing all young learners with access to:

• Quality learning environments with research-based early literacy resources;
• Safe learning environments by fostering positive relationships between teachers and students and empowering familial involvement; and
• Equitable learning environments where students thrive through child-centered activities and personalized instruction.

Specifically, WordScientists supports teachers to adapt their teaching strategies by targeting individual needs. WordScientists also bridges classrooms and families in remote and hybrid settings to maximize learning outcomes. 

WordScientists has been working with three different communities around the world (United States, Nepal, and Lebanon), supporting nine schools in total, to test our product and service as we refine our business model.

We translate scientific research on language and early literacy into pedagogical practice.

Helping young children in early literacy is not a new idea. However, WordScientists takes an innovative approach by targeting educators and empowering families. Because we believe education happens with pedagogy and instruction, WordScientists provides built-in professional development courses and explicit oral language instruction for adults.

Everything is in one place, accessible with the click of a button wherever you are.

To support educators and families through in-person, remote, and hybrid means, WordScientists simplifies the approach in one place. No matter the environment, WordScientists is equipped with a variety of teaching strategies for early literacy and the utilities for those strategies which are organized in the all-in-one system.

The curriculum develops crucial skills that young learners need in the 21st century.

While the WordScientists curriculum is designed to teach early literacy, it is also heavily focused on developing metacognitive and critical thinking skills to meet the needs of today's young learners. WordScientists offers strategic steps to help students learn to read words, become fluent readers, understand what they read, and use academic language to talk about their comprehension. Instructions on making inferences and finding supportive evidence from the text or illustrations create the habit of strategic readers.

WordScientists currently serves about 2,000 people.

At the moment, we are working with four schools in Connecticut in the United States, four schools in Kathmandu, Nepal, and one school in Lebanon.

WordScientists will serve 20,000+ in one year.

We have a potential partnership opportunity with schools in Ecuador, where we hope to directly serve more than 1,000 students. And we forecast that our user base will grow through marketing and other partnership opportunities.

WordScientists will serve 1,000,000+ in five years.

In five years, we expect our user base to grow further as we expand our services around the world. The hypothetical number includes teachers, reading aides, literacy specialists, families, and learners whom our product and/or service can directly and meaningfully touch.

Since the prototype stage, WordScientists has regularly measured the progress on various levels to evaluate the outputs. Some of the measurable indicators we have been using include the following.

We use the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) Test to measure progress in learners' reading achievements.

Progress: Learners in participating schools in Nepal outperformed their peers in a comparison school on the EGRA test, which assessed the foundational skills of early reading.

We use the Early Literacy Teaching Knowledge Assessment Survey to measure progress in educators' teaching knowledge and skills.

Progress: Teachers participating in instructional support sessions with WordScientists achieved higher results than teachers in a comparison group.

We use Feedback Survey and Interview to measure progress in product/service outputs.  

Progress: Families and Educators showed confidence that they can continue teaching early literacy with WordScientists resources after participating in instructional support sessions.

We have three full-time staff, five part-time staff, and seven contractors.

• Full-Time 
  • CEO (1)
  • COO/Head of Product (1)
  • Director of Curriculum (1)
• Part-Time
  • Early Literacy Specialists (2)
  • Marketing Lead (1)
  • Media Production Lead (1)
  • Software Engineer (1)
• Contractors
  • Illustrator (1)
  • UI/UX Designer (1)
  • Graphic Designer (1)
  • Voice Actors (3)
  • Puppeteer (1)

The WordScientists project began in 2015 as a prototype working with schools in Nepal. Since then, it has evolved into a company with its own product and services.

Along the way, the Team WordScientists grew as like-minded people came together. While from different walks of life, we all had one thing in common: We were drawn into this because the challenge and the idea resonated with us. Some of us have taught early literacy for more than 20 years and always dreamed of products like this. Others represent those we serve on many different levels as they have experienced the challenge themselves: as a young boy who had dyslexia, as young girls who learned English as a second language, and as parents who have been supporting struggling learners. It is our life experiences that help us better understand what we need to solve and give us the drive to develop and deliver the solution.

Though small, our team consists of key players whose expertise have shaped our solution: early literacy experts, software engineer, marketing guru, media production masters, designers and illustrators, and professional jugglers who know how to navigate their way through. 

Additionally, how our team has worked together uniquely positioned us to best serve our target population during the pandemic. As we are based in different time zones, we have always worked in remote or hybrid settings. Such experiences have guided us through as we solve the challenge in the pandemic and prepare for the post-pandemic era.

Our team strives for excellence, and we have witnessed that excellent people naturally bring diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our leadership team is committed to creating a safe, inclusive, and equitable working environment, where everyone feels a sense of belongingness, openness, and respect.

Some tangible goals in building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team include but are not limited to:

• Creating our own equal opportunity and anti-discrimination policies.
• Having a Peoples Manager on board to spearhead and foster drives and values in the team.

On the other hand, our team has also designed our solution with these values in mind to walk the talk. Specifically, we make sure our characters are representative of children from different parts of the world; and each voice actor for these character puppets are of their respective ethnicity and culture, so that young learners around the world can relate to the characters while they learn to read.

Solve can provide exposure and access to 1) key local/global contacts for future partnership opportunities and 2) connections to the MIT campus and other universities. That said, we believe becoming a Solver leverages our potential to tackle various barriers we have identified in order to upscale:

• Financial Barriers

Partnership opportunities with various organizations will help us achieve financial sustainability.

• Technical Barriers

Connections to Solve will provide us with technology partners and mentors for engineering assistance.

• Marketing Barriers

Through the publicity associated with Solve, we expect to have introductions and exposure to more populations around the world.

We would love to have supportive partners in the areas where we have challenges and barriers:

• Public Relations: global marketing strategy, social media marketing, and global branding plans.
• Product/Service Distribution: expanding user base through partnerships or collaboration with other organizations.
• Technology: website development, mobile app development, UI/UX design, and website data analysis.

We would like to partner with the MIT Innovation Initiative, whose innovative and entrepreneurial resources empower their partners to refine business models and actualize solutions. We would be honored to get to know MIT Innovation Initiative more deeply.

Among Solve members, APCO Worldwide caught our attention as their media team and their marketing strategies have a great impact on reach. We are also excited to meet AutoCognita and Vodafone Americas Foundation; we would love to learn from their insights as we plan to build our own mobile literacy platform and serve more people. Additionally, we look forward to meeting Compassion International to pursue early literacy development around the world. We would also love to learn from Stand Together on how to build more equitable learning environments and scale our own solution.