Reading So Lit

Reading So Lit is a web-based reading identity exploration and assessment platform for preK-5. This novel reading tool is designed to capture strengths-based data about the reading content and conditions that students prefer. It supplements deficit-framed assessments by equipping students with vocabulary and world knowledge to better understand and articulate their reading preferences. The platform's actionable, reading identity profiles enable educators to personalize content, instruction, and learning environments, accelerating reading achievement for the most vulnerable students.

Core Features of Reading So Lit:

1. AI-Enabled Tool:

   • The platform leverages artificial intelligence to create adaptive instructional and assessment content. Its strengths-based data supports student-driven procurement and pedagogy decisions that accelerate learning by improving non-academic and SEL reading competencies, such as reading identity, confidence, engagement, and motivation.

2. Integration and Implementation:

   • It seamlessly integrates into classroom or afterschool routines, requiring just 20-40 minutes per lesson three times a week for eight weeks. Classroom teachers, school support staff, or teens can implement this supplemental reading assessment program. 

3. Multimedia Teaching Modules and Assessments:

   • It uses multimedia instructional and assessment content support engaging whole group discussions and independent reading explorations. Each of the platform's 8 units explore a different dimension or domain of reading identity—such as reading spots and nonfiction genres. Both instruction and independent practice help increase students' self-awareness of their reading identity.

4. SEL and Literacy Learning Framework:

   • Its unique learning framework addresses critical gaps in non-academic and SEL reading competencies such as reading identity, self-efficacy, agency, confidence, engagement, and motivation. Emerging research suggests that these elements are especially important for accelerating reading achievement for students of color.

5. Data Dashboard:

   • Educators and school leaders have access to strength-based insights and data that offer detailed analyses of the types of content and conditions that make reading personally meaningful, relevant, and engaging for students, enabling learning personalize at the individual and group level.

6. Gamified Reading Explorations and Assessments:

   • Gamified reading activities and assessments enable students to independently practice and apply concepts introduced during whole group instruction. This feature supports stealth assessments that deepen educators' and parents understanding students' reading preferences. 

Pilot and Iteration Plans:

We're seeking funding for a research partnership with LeanLab Education or a comparable organization to conduct a usability and feasibility study of the Reading So Lit platform during the 2024-2025 school year. This pilot of our high-tech MVP will guide platform iteration and establish initial evidence of the relationship between reading identity development and reading performance.

Impact and Future Goals:

Reading So Lit aims to revolutionize reading assessment and elementary school procurement by supplementing deficit-based learning and assessment frameworks that focus narrowly on what students don't know and can't do with strengths-based early literacy curriculum and assessment. This tool aims to accelerate reading achievement for America's most vulnerable students by supporting unprecedented levels of learning personalization and improving non-academic and SEL elements of reading success. 

With your support, Reading So Lit can place young learners in the driver's seat their reading journeys and ensure they each of them can confidently declare, “I’m a reader!”

Reading So Lit accelerates reading achievements among America's most vulnerable preK-5 students by empowering educators and education administrators with actionable data to make cost-effective and student-driven decisions that result in dramatically more students identifying as readers and reading for fun. Despite investing more than $160 billion annually on preK-5 students in Title I schools in the U.S., a decreasing amount students read for fun and over 80% of Black and Latino students do not read proficiently. Most school procurement decisions do not include direct input from students, which are driven primarily by deficit-based approaches that focus narrowly on reading remediation. Reading So Lit aims to disrupt systemic educational equities that disproportionately impact America's low-income students of color by integrating their reading and learning preferences into the school procurement process and instructional decisions.

The Reading So Lit platform addresses a root cause of chronic reading underachievement among low-income Black and Latino students; many of America's most vulnerable students do not identify as readers and do not read for fun. According to longitudinal reading data from the U.S. Department of Education, significantly less students report reading for fun today than before the pandemic. However, reluctance to reading is a natural response to a systemic lack of personalized reading supports, uninspiring instruction or content, and persistent reading trauma. If fact, many students' resistance to reading should be interpreted as a form of self-love. Children, much like adults, don't want to be tortured with irrelevant content and reading experiences or be constantly reminded of their perceived inadequacies.

The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund's 2022 white paper, "Reading Reimagined" suggests that non-academic elements of learning, such as reading identity, play an outsized role in accelerating reading achiement for Black and Latino students. However, common early literacy curriculums and assessments do not explicitly support reading identity development or address other non-academic and SEL elements of reading like reading confidence, self-efficacy, agency, engagement, and motivation.

Reading So Lit integrates AI-generated images and image captions and leverages multimedia-based instruction, independent digital activities, and self-assessments to equip low-income students of color with vocabulary and world knowledge to better understand and articulate the content and conditions that make reading personally relevant and engaging. It also equips them to independently curate and self-advocate for meaningful reading experiences. Providing educators a strengths-based learning and assessment framework and corresponding data will help reduce reading trauma and counter negative self-stereotypes that reduce reading motivation and engagement. 

The platform's student reading preference data will enable educators to personalize content curation, reading instruction, and learning environments. It will also help school and district leaders make student driven procurement decisions that reduce costs and achieve sticky reading gains that are more resistance to negative factors like summer slide and chronic absenteeism. Future iterations of the tool will leverage machine learning and recommendation AI to continuously improve its efficacy and to automate learning personalization.

Our team’s ability to deliver this solution stems from our profound connection with the students we aim to serve and the diverse expertise and experience of our advisors and contractors.

Proximity and Representation

At the core of our tech team is Laurence Welch, a member of the Barbershop Books Board and an engineering manager at Cloudflare. Laurence’s experience in tech innovation at major companies like Spotify equips him with the insight to lead our project’s technology strategies in ways that resonate with community needs. His dual roles ensure that our technological solutions are both advanced and accessible to the community members we aim to serve.

Matthew Harris, with two decades in software development and data science, and currently overseeing data strategy at DataKind, brings a commitment to ethical data use and a unique analytical perspective from his interest in astrophysics. His expertise ensures that our solutions are data-driven and grounded in real-world applications, making them both effective and tailored to community needs.

Dr. Melissa Boyd, a clinical psychologist and children’s book author, has extensive experience in clinical and educational settings, specializing in social-emotional learning and child psychology. Her insights directly influence the development of educational curriculum and assessment content, ensuring that it supports both early literacy development and children's emotional and psychological health.

Malcolm Dill, actively teaching in a NYC public elementary school childhood, brings firsthand experience of the educational landscape and its challenges and has the added experience of serving as a founding Reading So Lit Summer educator. His current role as a Special Education Coordinator enables us to integrate inclusive strategies that help ensure the tool is equitable and impactful.

Community-Driven Design

Our approach to design and implementation is heavily influenced by continuous community engagement including 5 low-tech program pilots virtually during the summer and in first grade classrooms, and family shelters. By integrating participant feedback from educators, parents, and children at every phase of its development, Reading So Lit's iteration is guided by the communities we seek to serve.

Additionally, our collaboration with external experts such as 10 Pearls for MVP development, School Harbor for fractional CTO services, Rye Consulting for our go-to-market strategy, and Realized Curriculum Solutions for curriculum development work in concert to expand our capacity to deliver a an effective solution. These partnerships provide specialized insights and technical assistance, ensuring our platform meets high EdTech standards.

Strategic Expansion and Research Partnerships

To establish initial and independently verified evidence of the relationship between reading identity development and reading performance, we are seeking funding to support a research partnership with LeanLab Education to conduct a usability and feasibility study during the 2024-2025 school year. 

In conclusion, our diverse team is equipped with the necessary skills, expertise, and experience required to successfully pilot Reading So Lit. This team is building a foundation for scalable impacts in the future that are student-centric, teacher informed, and AI-powered, making us the right team to deliver this solution.

Over three years, we developed and successfully tested a low-tech Reading So Lit prototype that used a WordPress LMS plugin, Google slides, PDF lesson plans, and a 76-page printed activity book. This proof of concept generated critical early feedback from educators, children, and parents. An iterative process involving interviews with prospective buyers, 3 classroom pilots, and a market analysis and product positioning project with Rye Consulting informs the design and development of our current MVP.

With additional funding for a research partnership with LeanLab, we plan to pilot our AI-enabled Reading So Lit tool during the 2024-2025 school year. 

The following characteristics and strategies distinguish the Reading So Lit platform from other tech-enabled reading curriculums and assessment tools.

• Won Tools Competition's 2023 Catalyst Award for Assessment
• Explicitly supports reading identity development, exploration, and assessment
• Improves and assesses non-academic and SEL reading competencies
• Uses a novel SEL and literacy learning framework
• Uses strengths-based curriculum and assessment
• Enables student-driven procurement and pedagogy decisions
• Uses gamification and stealth assessments
• uses adaptive instructional content
• Co-developed with feedback from boys of color, their parents, and shelter-based social workers
• Co-designed with feedback from active teachers and school leaders

At scale, education administrators and entire directors can leverage insights from the platform's data to apply strategic pressure to preK-5 school vendors to better align products produced and purchased with the interests, needs, and preferences of students. It has the potential to also help education leaders find achieve significant cost saving and long-lasting academic gains by replacing expensive, time-consuming reading interventions with strategic procurement and pedagogy decisions that dramatically increase students' intrinsic motivation to read and learn outside of school. 

Wide adoption of the Reading So Lit platform would likely inspire EdTech companies and non-tech learning solutions providers to begin integrating more strengths-based curricula and assessments.

The Reading So Lit platform housed on the AWS cloud and leverages Pendo to enhance the user experience and onboarding.

• Computer Vision
• Machine Learning
• Generative AI
• Recommendation AI
• Deep Learning
• Natural Language Processing

Barbershop Books has worked to cultivate the reading identity of Black boys in barbershops for more than 10 years. A 2-year program evaluation of the Barbershop Books program in participating Philadelphia barbershops by NYU Education Professor Susan Nueman, one of America's leading literacy researchers, reveals promising results and suggests that interventions can positively impact the reading identity development of Black boys and other vulnerable children. Dr. Neuman's evaluation found that Black boys in participating barbershop were more likely to be observed reading, more likely to be observed reading independently, and more likely to identify as readers than boys in non-participating barbershops.

The Reading So Lit platform builds on this evidence and insights from Barbershop Books' community-based literacy programming to equip and empower educators to support non-academic and SEL reading competencies such as reading identity. It also seeks to establish evidence of the connection between reading identity development and reading performance.

Analysis of program outcomes and participant feedback from 5 pilots of the low-tech prototype reveal the following promising program results. Additionally, parent testimonials like this highlight the efficacy of the this approach. The Advanced Education Research and Development's 2022 white paper, "Reading Reimagined" outlines an emerging body of research that suggest non-academic elements of reading play an important role in accelerating reading achievement for Black and Latino students.

Reading So Lit Pilot Outcomes

• Increased reading motivation
• Increased reading engagement
• Improved vocabulary and world knowledge
• Enabled teachers and school leaders to make student-driven book procurement decisions
• Enabled educators to make personalized reading recommendations to students and caregivers
• Caused Black and Latino boys to identify more as readers

The Reading So Lit platform is inherently culturally responsive because it enables teachers to adapt the instructional content within parameters of the programs' unit topics. Additionally, machine learning will be leveraged to analyze teacher and student interactions with the platform's content to continuously improve the efficacy of the tool. Generative AI will be leveraged to ensure visual representation across different geographic areas and a variety of demographic considerations. 

• 2 Barbershop Books FT Staff (allocated only a portion of time)
• 1 Barbershop Books Board Member
• 6 Pro bono advisors
• 3 Contractors