The post 3 Ways Adaptive Learning Supports Foundational Math and Reading for Elementary Students appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>Every student deserves to feel seen, supported, and capable of success, but in today’s classrooms, that’s easier said than done. With wide-ranging skill levels across math and reading curriculum, learning gaps, and growing demands on teacher time, it’s hard to give every learner what they need, when they need it. That’s where interactive learning platforms with adaptive technology can play a vital role.
Learning is cumulative, and small skill gaps can become major roadblocks if left unaddressed. Adaptive programs can identify missed concepts early, sometimes before a teacher even sees them, and automatically provide targeted practice or revisit foundational concepts.
The How: Continuously Detect, Assess, and Target
Adaptive learning programs work behind the scenes to detect when a student is struggling. The programs don’t wait for formal, summative assessment to intervene. Instead, programs like DreamBox Math and DreamBox Reading use continuous formative assessments to analyze patterns like repeated errors, hesitation, and inefficient strategies. The programs then respond instantly to offer support the moment a student needs it, without disrupting a student’s learning momentum. At the same time, these programs capture student progress and provide data-rich reports that offer educators actionable insights, enabling them to differentiate instruction, target small-group work, and make informed decisions that deepen student learning.
Catching learning gaps early keeps students on track and prevents them from falling behind. This proactive, just-in-time support is especially effective in addressing unfinished learning and avoiding costly remediation.
Adaptive learning platforms don’t just deliver digital content. They respond in real time to how each student learns, creating personalized virtual learning experiences that boost confidence, fill knowledge gaps, and help every student grow, at their own pace, and in their own way.
The How: Track, Analyze, Adjust in Real Time
Adaptive programs track more than just right or wrong answers, they continuously analyze how students solve problelms, how long they take, and where they hesitate. Based on this data, programs like DreamBox Math and DreamBox Reading adjust instruction in real time, tailoring the content, pacing, and scaffolding in real time.
Adaptive learning solutions help create the Zone of Proximal Development, the space where learning is most effective because it’s just beyond what a student can do independently, but still within reach.
A growth mindset is essential for learning. Adaptive learning technology reinforces this by helping students connect effort with progress. As they receive feedback and independently overcome challenges, they gain confidence that their abilities can grow with practice.
The How: Encourage Exploration, Productive Struggle, and Independence
DreamBox Math and Reading lessons are designed to support agency and progress through independent exploration and productive struggle. This type of adaptive technology offers hints and scaffolds only when necessary, allowing students to learn and grow by trying things, making mistakes, and seeing what works. As students successfully solve problems on their own, they build confidence and become more willing to take on new challenges.
Students who believe they can figure things out are more likely to stay engaged, take academic risks, and develop lifelong learning habits.In this space of productive struggle, students stay motivated and make progress, challenged by content that’s appropriately difficult, not too easy, and not overwhelming.
Adaptivity isn’t just about technology. It’s about creating responsive, student-centered classrooms. By choosing adaptive learning tools like DreamBox Math and Reading, educators can support every learner, close skill gaps, and build the confidence students need to succeed, now and in the future.
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]]>The post Effective Academic Intervention Strategies appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>At Emerson Elementary in Owosso, Michigan, Principal Jessica Aue is helping her teachers transform their approach to student intervention with the innovative Child Study Team—a unique initiative that delivers personalized academic intervention to address the whole child.
Here’s how Jessica and her team have established an empathetic yet results-driven process that’s changing students’ lives, empowering teachers, and strengthening family relationships.
A Child Study Team (CST) is a collaborative group of educators, psychologists, social workers, and parents who come together to identify and address challenges affecting students’ academic and social success. The purpose of the team is to implement effective, personalized academic intervention strategies that support the school’s goal of educating the whole child—not just through academic metrics, but by understanding their personal experiences, relationships, home life, and challenges.
The Child Study Team at Emerson believes that every child is more than just their academic scores. They dig deep to understand the whole child—exploring hobbies they enjoy, any trauma they’ve endured, their family dynamics, and their social environments. This holistic perspective helps determine personalized interventions that truly resonate.
The Child Study Team is about collaboration — bringing together different perspectives to create the best possible outcomes for students.
It’s a comprehensive process to identify students needing intervention and the type of intervention they need. But Emerson’s team has a successful process put into place to ensure all students get a fair chance at success.
Here are the steps to the CST process:
The Title I team may lead the intervention strategies and implementations, but collaborating with the students’ teachers is also key to the CST success. Jessica recognizes the importance of the CST working closely with the rest of the staff. “The teachers are the experts,” she says. “Trust them. If there’s a lack of trust, figure out why and address it.” This trust allows flexibility and creativity within the intervention process while ensuring students receive the highest level of care and support.
A huge strength of Emerson’s Child Study Team lies in its ability to balance data-driven decision-making with the context that comes from strong personal relationships with students and families.
“We use data, of course—things like test scores and progress monitoring results,” Jessica explains. “But we also know what students like to do and what their home life is like. This context helps us create interventions that are effective.” Jessica also emphasizes, “The people on your team make a huge difference. Our teachers, social workers, and psychologists know each student so well, which allows us to make better decisions. They’re not just staff members—they’re truly advocates for our kids.”
Prioritizing relationships has had ripple effects. Jessica’s philosophy of involving families closely in the process has fostered trust and collaboration between parents and the school. Families know they can rely on the team to care for their child while also holding them accountable, creating a balance of empathy and high expectations.
The focus on the whole child has made Emerson Elementary’s approach stand out. Teachers and staff have seen firsthand how a deeper understanding of each student leads to better outcomes—whether that’s catching phonics gaps missed by traditional assessments or creating unique behavioral interventions tailored to a student’s personality.
While Jessica acknowledges that the close-knit nature of Emerson Elementary helps make their Child Study Team successful, she believes the model can be scaled with the right commitment.
Some of her recommendations for scaling include:
The Child Study Team at Emerson Elementary goes beyond typical interventions. It represents a philosophy rooted in trust, empathy, and high expectations for every student. By prioritizing relationships, using data effectively, and empowering staff to make professional decisions, Emerson models what intervention can look like when the whole child is considered.
For principals, educators, and parents wondering how to get started, Jessica offers this advice: “Be consistent, value relationships, and always listen to the families. They know their children in ways that data never will.”
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]]>The post Remediation, Intervention, and Acceleration appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>Students’ learning needs are more diverse than ever. In a single classroom of 30 students, an educator may encounter 30 distinct levels of abilities, different skill sets, and various individual learning styles. With such variation, it can be difficult for educators to fully address each student’s unique needs. Educators must keep all students on positive learning trajectories, responding to individual student struggles while simultaneously working to meet education goals for all students in a classroom.
When educators identify struggling students or discover that student groups are not meeting learning goals, they must determine which strategy is the best way to respond.
Because each instructional approach requires a different learning environment, time investment, and resource allocation, it’s critical that educators employ the right approach, at the right time, for every student. This blog addresses some of these questions and can help ensure all three methods are being used to their full potential within a learning ecosystem.
At its core, remediation is simply reteaching material. Often a teacher will discover through formative assessment that a large population of students don’t understand a concept or skill that has been previously introduced. Once a teacher has determined exactly what the misconceptions or gaps are, they must quickly remediate instruction (reteach material) to prevent students from needing more targeted intervention in the future.
If students have failed to understand a concept that has already been taught, it’s possible the first approach missed the mark. Teachers must modify and adjust this initial attempt to build on previous lessons and focus on the specific misunderstanding students experienced the first time. When providing remediated instruction, it’s critical that teachers recognize why remediation was necessary and use a different approach moving forward.
Most educators use some level of informal remediation in their everyday instruction. This is often in the form of reviewing material again or refreshing students on a skill they’ll need to understand a new skill.
Accelerated learning is an approach that allows educators to teach all students at-level coursework, and provide just-in-time support when students need help with a critical skill that may have otherwise prevented them from accessing grade-level content. This method builds on what students already know to learn new, grade-level material. Studies have shown that when students tie background knowledge to new information, they are better at making inferences and can retain the new information more effectively.
During instruction, teachers build in stopping points to diagnose and address any gaps in understanding in context of the grade-level material. During lessons, students tap into their prior knowledge and teachers provide instruction for the prerequisite skills that students need at a pace. By using this approach, teachers can determine which skills are necessary to work at grade-level and fill in gaps as they teach versus spending time reteaching skills that may not be critical for students to move on to the next concept.
In theory, accelerating learning can help struggling students demonstrate grade-level mastery because it breaks them out of a cycle of repeatedly reviewing below-grade-level concepts. Recent research from TNTP suggests that the brain is flexible enough to allow for these quick pivots in instruction, and that when students who have fallen behind are given grade-level work along with stronger instruction and higher expectations, they catch up faster than students who don’t receive grade-level material. The study also found that students who worked in accelerated learning classrooms during the pandemic demonstrated better learning outcomes than students who worked in remediation classrooms.
Intervention is a formal process for providing individual students in need of support with 1-1 or small group instruction beyond regular classroom lessons. In most cases, educators use a combination of screening tools and diagnostic assessments to identify students in need of intervention, and they formally set growth goals, and develop a detailed plan for delivering and monitoring intervention services.
Intervention can be similar to remediation as it is reteaching a skill that has been previously introduced, but the material is strategically targeted to meet each student’s specific needs or learning styles. Unlike most remediation efforts, teachers also carefully track progress for intervention efforts in order to measure student growth and program’s efficacy.
Many intervention models include Response to intervention (RTI) or Multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) frameworks. MTSS is a coherent continuum of evidence-based, systemwide practices and procedures to support a rapid response to academic and behavioral needs. RTI is a multi-tiered approach to helping struggling learners that nestles within MTSS. It focuses on academics and individual students. Within RTI, students’ progress is closely monitored at each intervention stage to determine the need for further research-based instruction or intervention in general education, special education or both.
Because intervention is individualized, it requires educators to invest much more time into identifying each student’s needs, differentiating lessons, and tracking progress. In a traditional intervention model, highly-trained instructors work 1:1 with students to provide the exact type of support they need. Many administrators turn to adaptive technology as a helpful tool to provide personalized intervention support at scale.
Students fit into three intervention tiers; students within Tier I generally get the support they need from regular classroom instruction.
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Remediation
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Intervention
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Acceleration
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|---|---|---|---|
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Skill building |
Educators reteach all missing skills to a whole group. |
Educators analyze specific missing skills and target instruction in small groups or 1:1. |
Educators strategically select specific critical skills just in time for new concepts so students can apply skills immediately. |
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Pace |
Students go backward on the learning journey to relearn or revisit missed concepts before they can move on to the next concept. |
Educators adjust the learning pace to ensure individual students achieve mastery within a specific skill in order to build better understanding of the next concept. |
Educators keep a forward, active pace in the classroom to allow all students to learn grade-level content with their peers. |
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Confidence |
Students may perceive themselves in the slow class or may feel they can’t learn content they should have mastered before. |
Students often feel supported and getting the attention they need in order to meet learning goals. |
Students feel engaged and like they are making the right progress with their peers. |
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In Practice Third-grade students returning from one year of remote learning. |
Educators start over with last year’s content. Students relearn the skills from second grade. |
Educators formally identify students in need of extra support across specific skills. They track intervention efforts and move students into regular instruction as they gain skills. |
Educators weave in key second grade-level content just in time as the class works on new grade-level content. They integrate concepts from unfinished learning into new context, and students make connections and accelerate. |
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]]>The post How to Select and Implement a Reading Intervention Program appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>According to the latest NAEP assessment data, 2023 reading scores declined across the country. Consequently, school leaders and educators have considered how to respond to this updated data. Many school districts have implemented or plan to implement a reading intervention program that yields rapid results. However, not every reading intervention program is made equal, and there are a lot of factors to consider before you make the investment. In this article, the DE team shares recommendations from experts on selecting and effectively implementing a reading intervention program for your district’s needs.
It should come as no surprise that evidence of effectiveness is considered to be the biggest influence on decision-making for the majority of educators. When the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was passed in 2015, educators increased their focus on programs with evidence of impact to ensure better student outcomes. When selecting any new curriculum resource, it is necessary to evaluate its effectiveness to determine if the proven impacts match district goals and needs.
“Effectiveness is huge, and most programs have some measures of data,” says Larry Shifflett, Assistant Superintendent of Innovation and Learning for Rockingham County Public Schools. “We rely on our teachers and their expertise to say, ‘here [are] the gains we’re seeing with the kids, and here’s the ease of the program and how it works’…so teacher buy-in is tremendous. They’ll know if it’s a good program or not.”
For reading intervention programs, there are a variety of skills that these programs may cover, and not every student needs remediation on every reading skill. Evaluating a program’s effectiveness on the specific components of reading students in your district need remediation on ensures that the program will match your goals and help your students succeed.
Of course, teacher judgment follows close behind, as a reading intervention can be implemented in a broad range of contexts, including across the whole school, in a subject-area classroom, or through a supplemental program. Teachers will be the ones directing and overseeing student use of the program, so having their buy-in is critical.
Although a wealth of success stories from other schools and districts can point you in the right direction, you should also consider piloting the program in your particular school or district to understand if it’s right for you. Every state, district, and school has their own set of challenges, but they also have their own set of educators working hard to improve student achievement. Gaining educator support of a new initiative or curriculum ensures these resources will actually be used with fidelity, and a strong implementation will prepare educators to try new things.
After all, as Shifflett says, “The programs are no better than the people who run them…. We’re professionals, we’re the educators—and the programs are tools and resources we use to move [students] along.” Shifflett also advises, when you evaluate reading intervention programs, you should consider their flexibility and ensure that you’re taking into account teachers’ opinions of each program. How well can your teachers work with and around the program to maximize its effectiveness? How can you ensure this program doesn’t add to teachers’ plates, but instead alleviates some of the pressures of improving student reading abilities?
The 2023 NAEP data indicated that higher-performing students were more likely to read for fun. To help inspire students to create positive reading habits, reading intervention programs should offer out-of-classroom access to resources. Allowing students to practice reading skills at home or at school also mitigates challenges that can come with student absenteeism or even changing school schedules due to events and assessments.
As a teacher working directly with students in the classroom, Beth Carabetta, Reading Coach, Maloney High School in Meriden, CT, sets her students up for success by remaining flexible in her instructional approach, allowing students to select the texts of most interest to them, and encouraging students to continue their reading practice outside of the classroom. “Another thing that’s important to student success is being able to offer anytime-anywhere learning,” she continues. “To really make gains in reading, being able to utilize a program not only within the walls of the classroom but outside of the classroom as well.”
A 2015 study of eighth graders found that when students experienced a shift from assigned, required reading to independently chosen reading materials, student engagement saw a significant increase. Students who are struggling readers may not find reading exciting or fun but encouraging them to pursue their interests and read about topics that interest them can help create more positive connections with reading. Reading intervention programs that allow for student agency and choice can take some of the “work” out of the experience.
“Students—especially at the high school level—like to have a choice in the materials they’re reading and have some control over what they’re reading, provided that it’s at their level,” says Carabetta. “With the Reading Plus program, that’s definitely something that students have the ability to do.” That flexibility and control over what, when, and where students can engage with texts is one of the key characteristics to look for in your reading intervention.
“We were looking for [a reading intervention program] to give students confidence and make them feel empowered,” agrees Susan Perrone, Supervisor of Curriculum & Accountability, Meriden Public Schools, who supports Carabetta at the district level. “We wanted to make sure that, as secondary students, they weren’t looking at things that were elementary. We wanted a program that had choice…that motivated them to change…that made them want to learn. Reading Plus really seemed to hit that mark.” Choosing an easy-to-use, flexible, and evidence-based intervention program will help you maximize your return on investment.
Once you’ve chosen a reading intervention that suits your needs, how do you implement it to ensure its success? There are 3 ingredients to keep in mind as you write out a recipe for successful implementation.
Effective school leaders who encourage a culture of literacy to keep both teachers and students engaged in reading instruction may have the biggest influence on the success of your reading intervention. When leaders are committed to the program, willing to invest their time and energy into making sure it’s successful, and communicative about its importance, reading intervention programs are more likely to provide the reading growth that your students need.
A culture of safe, healthy, confident learning gives students the intrinsic motivation they need to drastically improve their reading scores. Motivation—along with comprehension and silent reading efficiency—is one of the most important components of developing reading skills in students.
While the decline in reading scores is alarming and there is an urgency to respond, educators must be strategic when determining actions to help students gain necessary skills for proficiency. Now is the time to provide students with what they need to help them find success this year and, in the future, so that they can be on the path to graduate on time, pursue post-secondary opportunities and compete in a global economy. With this new assessment data in mind, it is important to consider what new information the data presents about student performance, instruction, and areas for growth. Reading intervention programs like Reading Park and Reading Plus can help educators tailor instruction to fit their students’ needs, and when implemented mindfully, can help make a great impact on student literacy skills.
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]]>The post Four Principles for Effective Math Intervention appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>The Institute for Education Sciences, an authority on Response to Intervention (RtI) for math published a groundbreaking report on RtI that outlines a series of intervention recommendations. The report Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Response to Intervention (RtI) for Elementary and Middle schools covers recommendations that were judged to have strong or moderate evidence to support RtI and provide the foundation for effective math intervention. Here are specific strategies that fall under these four key recommendations:
This recommendation from the report includes providing models of proficient problem solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback, and frequent cumulative review.
Students who have been classified as Tier 2 or 3 in RtI need their instruction to be organized and scaffolded. They lack the numeracy skills and background knowledge to engage in theoretical exercises with math
Nothing is more systematic than the four-step approach to problem solving, first outlined by educator George Polly in 1945:
A stripped-down version of the Gradual Release Model—the “I do, We do, You do” strategy—is effective in all levels of education. As RtI students require as much structure as possible, the strategy gives them an effective way to know what to expect from a lesson. In word problems, not only can “I do, We do, You do” be used to solve problems, it can also be used to have students create their own word problems, reaching synthesis, a higher level of taxonomy. Students should start with sentences that involve a specific math operation and build from there. (McCarney, S. B., Cummins Wunderlich, K., Bauer, A. The Teacher’s Resource Guide.)
This recommendation from the RtI report goes on to say that interventionists should be proficient in the use of visual representations of mathematical ideas. Graphics are important in math instruction, especially as the curriculum becomes more data=based under the Common Core State Standards. RtI students are not excluded from having to be able to read charts, graphs, and other math graphics. Intervention Central, which provides educators with free RtI resources, has a great intervention that uses the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) to help students break down math graphics. In short, QARs come in four types:
Rehearsal of math facts is a key step in the RtI process because many of the students who fall into Tier 2 or 3 status are missing key pieces of background information, usually in the form of math facts.
Taking ten minutes each day to review facts is typically done with flash cards, which can be tedious and, therefore, does not always prove to be effective. Another strategy, described by Intervention Central, uses flash-card practice that balances “known” facts with “unknown” facts. Unknown facts are modeled by a teacher or tutor and then presented with known facts—those already mastered by the student—in a sequence. Not only does this systematically build recall, it also builds confidence in the student because they are consistently getting cards correct throughout the process.
Digital curriculum, at its best, incorporates the scaffolds and formative assessment that define successful RtI for math. Personalized learning and ongoing, robust data collection provide a meaningful feedback loop for both the student and teacher that leads to deeper learning and higher achievement. Real-time feedback—while learning is happening—is critical so that students don’t practice new math skills, again and again, incorrectly.
Technological interventions to boost math achievement can be an important part of a successful math intervention, but a commitment to the process is also a necessary part of helping students succeed in math and sharpen their math skills.
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]]>The post 8 Research-Based Instructional Recommendations for Students with Signs of Dyslexia appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>One in five students has a language-based learning disability, the most common of which is dyslexia. Of students with reading difficulties, up to 80 percent are likely to have some form of dyslexia. Unfortunately, many of these children go undiagnosed until well after the primary grades, leading to significant difficulty with reading and subject-area studies.
Fortunately, awareness of dyslexia is rapidly growing. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education issued a new policy affirming that students with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia are specifically eligible for school support funded through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
At the time of this publication, more than 40 states now have dyslexia laws, and an increasing number of school districts are increasing diagnostic and instructional services for students with signs of dyslexia. While state mandates are not always fully funded, the fact is that there is strong research supporting specific evidence-based instructional practices that enable dyslexic students to become successful readers and strong academic achievers.
Multisensory learning is a method of learning that includes more than one sense, such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Because multisensory learning activates multiple parts of the brain, it’s been shown to increase engagement and enhance memory in all learners—but especially those with dyslexic characteristics.
International Dyslexia Association (IDA) recommends incorporating two or three of the senses into reading instruction to help dyslexic children better understand new information and make the lesson stick.
Explicit instruction, as defined by the IDA, is “the deliberate teaching of all concepts with continuous student-teacher interaction. It is not assumed that students will naturally deduce these concepts on their own.”
This student-teacher interaction is critical because very few students have the motivation or confidence to teach themselves, especially if they’re already struggling with dyslexic characteristics.
When a student has achieved adequate reading fluency, that means that they’re able to read text quickly, smoothly, and accurately. When they’re reading aloud, they can place the proper expression and intonation on the words, and they can comprehend what they’re reading without pausing to decode each individual word.
Poor reading fluency is a very common characteristic of dyslexia and other reading disabilities; problems with reading fluency can linger even when students’ accuracy in word decoding has been improved through effective phonics intervention.
However, when students switch from oral reading practice to silent reading practice, you can no longer hear these pauses or mispronunciations, so it’s much more difficult to discern whether or not a student is struggling with fluency.
To help dyslexic students develop fluency, the IDA recommends that teachers:
Knowledge of word meanings is critical to comprehension. When we read, we recognize words and word families we know. That’s why vocabulary acquisition is an essential element of reading growth.
In fact, cognitive scientists have suggested that vocabulary is one of the greatest predictors of reading comprehension.
As the IDA states, “research supports both explicit, systematic teaching of word meanings and indirect methods of instruction such as those involving inferring meanings of words from sentence context or from word parts.”
A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that still holds meaning. Morphology, then, is the study of base words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
When educators incorporate morphology into reading instruction for students with dyslexic characteristics, they help them more quickly and easily decipher unfamiliar words in a text.
For example, when a student understands that the word expectation means “a belief about the future,” then they can also easily infer the meanings of expected, expectancy, and unexpected.
Diagnostic teaching is an instructional approach that aims to pinpoint exactly why a particular student is struggling and then provide individualized instruction to meet that student’s needs.
The IDA recommends that educators take both informal (for example, by observing the student in explicit instruction) and formal assessments (for example, by assigning standardized tests) of their students’ needs.
According to the IDA, effective reading instruction for students with signs of dyslexia is both:
Rather than allowing students to fall back into less difficult texts or frustrate themselves by moving ahead too quickly, you should structure the lessons in a way that enables students to strengthen their existing skills while developing new ones.
Syntax and semantics deal with the grammatical, mechanical, and sensible structure of language. They are the set of rules and principles that allow us to both convey and decipher meaning in a text.
The IDA recommends that educators include instruction in both syntax and semantics to help students with signs of dyslexia understand the mechanics of language, the relationship between words, and the contextual meaning of texts.
Incorporating all eight IDA recommendations into the ELA curriculum can be difficult. Fortunately, research has shown that Reading Plus is effective in meeting the needs of students with various reading needs, including those with signs of dyslexia.
The program is designed to help students establish efficient reading habits that enable them to spend their mental resources on interpreting and appreciating what they read, rather than battling with the mechanics of reading. Key components of the program specifically meet the IDA recommendations.
Additionally, the program helps educators use data to diagnose individual student needs and drive effective literacy instruction for all learners.
Supporting all students in their learning journeys calls for reliable strategies, content, and curriculum. When it comes to learning disabilities like dyslexia, identifying the “right” strategies can make all the difference.
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