Riveting Results

Two-thirds of United States high school students cannot read grade-level text. As a result, they cannot access text in English, science, history and even math class that resonates with their level of sophistication. Forty percent of students in the US drop out of college and 54% read at fifth grade level or below. The problem is far greater in the developing world. In Africa, for example, according to EF English Proficiency Index https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/W... less than five percent of people are able to read high school level texts. They are shut out of fully participating in their economies.

Research is clear that the greatest obstacle to high school students reading complex text is that they never practice reading aloud. They never develop the oral fluency skills to navigate longer and more complex sentences, sentences that that they begin to see in 6th grade and that fill high school-level texts.

Literacy funding for the past twenty-five years has been devoted almost entirely to early elementary literacy. No currently available daily, core curriculum enables high school students to practice basic skills like fluency while they read advanced literature. Programs that exist are devoted to intervention classes designed for a few students reading several years behind. The students consider these programs babyish because they were designed originally for elementary students.

In core classes, high school English teachers have large classes, see students only fifty minutes a day and have to cover significant amounts of content. They need a software solution that enables students to practice oral fluency simultaneously and efficiently so that teachers can subsequently lead their students deeper and deeper into full novels and nonfiction.

In the Anglophone world the problem is more daunting. With large numbers of teachers who have learned English as their second language, developing countries need a software solution that will make training and implementation of highly engaging literacy activities easy so that they can focus on eliciting each student's best work and on leading dynamic class discussions about complex literature.

Riveting Results is a software-embedded, comprehensive ninth and tenth grade English Language Arts solution that embeds four highly engaging literacy activities into daily instruction. It is highly effective and easy to implement. It positions the teacher to focus entirely on eliciting each students' insights about advanced text and on leading dynamic classroom discussions.

When students begin reading an advanced text, their teacher guides them to the Riveting Results platform. When they begin a chapter, students first practice oral reading fluency. The software chunks complex sentences into parts so that students can rehearse and then record themselves reading the text aloud. Remote scorers listen to these recordings and tell the students the next morning whether or not they were proficient and the impact that their recordings had on them. This feedback energizes adolescents as they see that they can express themselves through when they read. 

Please see this LINK to watch a demonstration of fluency. (Please note: Included here is a description of an US Federal grant application to enable us to build an AI-enhancement for the fluency application. This AI-enhancement will be a particularly important innovation as we serve developing countries. The immediacy of automatic feedback will enable students to improve even more rapidly.)

Students then work with a partner to reread text (See this LINK). They first take a challenging multiple choice quiz about the chapter they just read. The software matches students with a partner who answered differently on a particularly challenging questions. The software requires that the students debate their choices until the pair lands on a consensus answer. The teacher can then gather the class together and ask students why they originally chose their answers and why they changed them.

Subsequently, students are matched with a partner to engage in a paraphrase activity. This activity challenges students to get in the head of the author and rewrite a phrase or sentence in their own words while capturing the author's meaning as closely as possible. Finally students are ready to offer their own insight and write 150 words about one particular moment in the text.

Riveting Results students have made remarkable progress. In an independent evaluation, Riveting Results students improved their reading and writing skills at three times the rate of the national average on standardized assessments.

The College Board has been so impressed with the performance of students using Riveting Results and their readiness for Advanced Placement classes that they will pay for half of the implementation costs for the first year.

Riveting Results currently works with 13 public and charter schools in six states in the United States. The great majority of these schools have a student population in which at least 95% receive free or reduced lunch subsidies. Typically 80% of the students in our schools start significantly behind. Riveting Results will not only enable them to read grade-level text proficiently but will enable many of them to succeed in Advanced Placement classes. We expect to be in 30 schools this fall, 100 schools in the fall of 2025, and 350 schools in the fall of 2026.

We have implemented Riveting Results at one school in Tanzania this spring. Students are making significant progress. We see tremendous potential, particularly as we develop AI-enhanced fluency software, to provide transformative English language instruction to African schools. We are currently developing systems that will enable us to address WiFi and hardware challenges in these under-resourced schools.

Our leadership team is based in the Middle East, Europe and the United States and has extensive experience working in developing countries and inner-city communities in the United States.

Deborah Reck is the founder and Chief Product Officer 

Deborah supervises the work of the software development team and the curriculum development teams. Reck has extensive experience in classroom teaching, in studying the impacts of instructional approaches and in product development, She served as Chief Academic Officer at Amplify and led the development of their grade 6-8 digital curriculum. In order to design and build the Riveting Results prototype, she has conducted rigorous research over the past 7 years, testing the Riveting Results prototype in schools throughout the country, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Jomila Smith is RR's Director of Implementation. She has been an administrator and school leader in the Boston Public schools for the past 15 years. She has turned around two underperforming schools in Boston and is an expert in training teachers to use data to inform their instruction.

Eduardo Bautista, RR’s Director of Technology, has ten years of experience producing commercial software (including seven at Riveting Results) and in leading teams of developers. He has led the development of three products that have been distributed nationally serving thousands of simultaneous users.

Charles Camp is Riveting Results’ Machine Learning Specialist. During the past eight years, Charles has developed machine learning solutions for a wide range of companies. His work building software that models how specific text combinations correspond to certain emotions makes him particularly well suited to build voice recognition software that identifies the emotional expression of the speaker.

Sarah Lupo is an Associate Professor at James Madison University. She is Riveting Results' primary researcher. She has been the Project Director on six different grants and has presented at more than 100 national literacy research conferences. Her experience conducting rigorous analysis of both qualitative and quantitative research makes her well suited to analyze our various sources of data. She is also widely considered an expert in adolescent literacy research.

Arthur Unobskey, is the CEO and has an Ed.D. in instructional leadership. He supervises all sales and marketing, seeks investment and oversees the company’s finances and operations. Dr. Unobskey’s national network of fellow superintendent and experience in every aspect of curriculum sales makes him the appropriate lead for the commercialization of Riveting Results. 

We currently have annual revenues of about $200,000 and we serve fourteen schools. We have a fully functioning platform that teachers use as their daily core English Language Arts curriculum. We have raised $400,000 from institutional and individual investors through SAFE investments.

Riveting Results can substantially increase the numbers of high school students who have high levels of English proficiency in developing countries. We are able to train teaching staff remotely in a brief amount of time to implement Riveting Result. We can also offer them substantial amounts of professional support and professional development remotely.

We would like to leverage your global contacts to help us navigate the government regulations and overcome the market's barriers to entry in the developing world. We also want to strategize how to find leaders who are innovative and open to a new solution. We feel there is a particularly robust opportunity in the Anglophone countries around Tanzania and in the low-cost private schools in India.

We are the only comprehensive English Language Arts program for high school students that applies the latest adolescent literacy research to a feasible and highly effective solution. Our software is simple and enables any teacher to empower their students, enabling them to read and write powerfully about complex text.

The research about adolescent literacy is clear. We have developed a product that enables any teacher to implement that research in a feasible and proven product. We expect our record of success to continue as we enter schools in the developing world.

We expect our students to improve their reading and writing skills at three times the rate of their peers. We measure our progress on standardized assessments that have large data sets to ensure consistency. Typically we use assessments in the United States like MAP or ACT.

In developing countries, we would like to work with school leaders and perhaps Solve to develop proficiency measures that are meaningful to those countries.

Riveting Results has developed its own web-based platform which teachers and students access to participate in the Riveting Results English Language Arts solution. We are planning to develop an AI enhancement to the fluency software to allow for immediate scoring of fluency recordings.

full-time: 7 

Part-time/contractors: 7

7 years

We have extensive contacts in the communities in which we work and provide a nurturing environment for our staff to grow. We have built the platform together, enabling newcomers to quickly take initiative in solving real-world problems. 

We charge an annual per student licensing fee. ($60 per year in 2024)

We provide professional development, coaching and access to all materials for this annual fee.

We typically do an introductory four-hours training in person and then provide remote training thereafter.

Schools seek us out when they want to significantly improve their students reading and writing proficiency.

We expect to serve 100 schools and become profitable in 2025. We will continue to provide our servicesfor a per student licensing fee.

We have received a grant from Silicon Schools and $400,000 in funding in SAFE notes so far.