Technology: Amira Powers Our Focused Research

Throughout the 50-year history of AI in education, guided practice with effective feedback has repeatedly demonstrated benefits for students. Successful Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) guide students to practice on specific tasks and challenges that align to a well-designed developmental learning progression in reading. 

ITS provides students with feedback that is timely, specific, and actionable. The selection of the tasks and generation of feedback builds upon a student model, which tracks information about the students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, thus enabling adaptation to the individual learner. Meta-analyses have established the overall efficacy of the ITS approach, including in reading.

U-GAIN Reading’s research builds on our ITS partner, Amira Learning. Amira serves over 4 million students worldwide across thousands of schools and districts, has core technology developed over decades of federally-funded research conducted by universities, state education agencies, and prominent research firms, and demonstrates statistically significant and meaningful effect sizes for reading gains.

Amira provides a scalable ITS for grade Pre-K-8 students learning to read. Amira listens as students read aloud, assesses their mastery, and provides 1:1 adaptive reading practice through speech, text, and pictures.

Our research will leverage Amira’s built-in, reliable measures to assess overall reading ability, including specific skills such as letter recognition, sound and word decoding, vocabulary knowledge, and indicators of dyslexia risk.