Mission

U-GAIN Reading envisions using GenAI to support students as they practice reading in elementary school. U-GAIN Reading seeks to amplify new knowledge about how to use GenAI to create content that matches each student’s interests and strengths, enables dialogue about the meaning of content, and adapts to a student’s progress and needs. 

U-GAIN Reading also seeks to build an evidence-base for the benefits of implementing this knowledge in a scalable reading platform; as well as offering national leadership on how to support and sustain students’ active reading in an age of AI. U-GAIN Reading will investigate how GenAI can enable 1:1 instruction that adapts to students’ strengths and needs. The center has two overarching research questions:

How can GenAI be integrated into existing supplementary programs to improve reading growth for students who are not yet reading connected text?

How can GenAI be integrated into existing supplementary programs to improve reading proficiency for students who are ready for a greater focus on comprehension?

While teacher-led instruction is essential, teachers do not have enough time in the school day to provide every student with enough individualized guided practice and feedback. We’ll explore how supplementary AI-enabled reading tools grounded in the Science of Reading can help. 

We will conduct research to support all learners. And because we care about students as individuals and know that students speak in different ways—with different accents, dialects and vocabularies, we will focus on variation in how students read aloud. For this reason, we’ll pay particular attention to the 5 million students who are English Learners (ELs) and exhibit important variations in how they speak as they read. While 33% of all 4th grade students are reading at a Below Basic level, for ELs, this number drops to 67% (NAEP, 2024). Thus through this research, we could make a dramatic impact both for all learners and for learners with historically low reading performance.

How Will We Accomplish This?

U-GAIN Reading leverages two strands of work, Focused Research and National Leadership, to accomplish its goals. 

Focused Research: Our focused research will explore adaptive reading interventions powered by GenAI. Experts in the Science of Reading, speech recognition, engagement, early learning with technology, and rigorous evaluation are working together on promising improvements to Amira, a powerful platform, for reading in grades 1-3. We will work in school settings with many striving readers, including ELs, to better design reading interventions that support all students.

To learn more about the science, theory, and approach behind our research, please visit Our Science.

National Leadership: Our national leadership efforts include: 

• Amplifying the work of practitioners to use Science of Reading research and emerging AI technologies in classrooms. 
• Building capacity by developing a national leadership cohort of dynamic educators who can lead their colleagues. 
• Hosting AI literacy events that explore how districts and schools can effectively use generative AI to enhance elementary reading instruction. 

To learn more about our leadership cohort, please visit Our Community