Illinois Public School District Hopes to Increase Literacy Skills in After School Program

Illinois Public School District Hopes to Increase Literacy Skills in After School Program

This school is looking for a digital supplementary tool for their after school program to help students practice and improve their literacy skills.

State: Illinois Number of Students: 3,301
School Type: Public School District Free and Reduced Lunch: 51.0%
Grade Level: PK-8 English Language Learners: 31.0%

School Context

This public middle school served roughly 1,000 6-8th graders. About 60% of the population received free and reduced lunch. There is a high population of ELL student and roughy 12% are receiving special educational services. They have an active and supportive community, who are mainly blue collar workers. The support and pride from the community attest to the successes this school has had academically. Additionally, the Principal reports that the school is progressive with their approach to preparing students for standardized testing.


State of Technology

The school's after school program assists students with skill deficiencies in literacy. Unfortunately, the need to differentiate instruction for students has become harder and harder for the certified teachers who facilitate the program. They are looking for a tool to not only help track student progress, but also to help personalize the intervention for the students and provide a way for students and teachers to attend the program from various locations.

Their after school program has great structure for Tier 2 students, but is not able to help those in Tier 3, which needs more differentiation. They currently do not have enough teachers to run the program without changing their model.


Tech Needs & Requirements

They are looking for an intervention literacy tool that a teacher can use to help identify skill deficiencies, help them monitor student progress, and can be implemented in a flexible way, primally in after school classrooms and in at-home environments. They would like the tool to have some sort of level-setting feature that helps students and teachers understand where students' skill deficiencies are. The tool should provide students multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery; however, the tool must note repeat a passage or content to retest. It should provide new content to give students another opportunity to practice the skill. The tool should be adaptive and adjust the path/level of skills based on the student's answers. If the student is at below-grade level, the content should still be age appropriate. The tool should make recommendations for the skill areas students should work on. The tool must be aligned to the Common Core Standards. The content should be rigorous and the tool should have demonstrated results in other schools. Ideally, the tool has PARCC-style questions. Teachers should be able to override the pathways when necessary. The tool should provide scaffolding for the students when they get an answer wrong. If there were additional resources for students to get help within the tool, that would be a nice to have. The tool should provide engaging content and motivational features to incentivize students to stay focused on the program, as students may be working independently.

The after-school program is primarily executed at the students' homes. Students will be responsible for completing the activities assigned by the teacher within the tool and will meet with the teacher 1-2 times a week. Roughly the student will use the tool 30 minutes 5 time a week.

The teacher will use the data generated by the tool to understand students' skill deficiencies and either assign or provide assistance to individual students based on the data. They would also use the data to create other lessons if necessary. Each teacher will likely be assigned to 15 students.

Content should adjust to students' skill levels, including a diagnostic/level-setting featured preferred. The tool must align to Common Core standards. The tool must work on Chromebooks and be evidence-based. The tool must provide robust data reporting. The school provides chromebooks. The school will use the data directly from the software to triangulate with MAP data. They would like to easily view progress data by student and by standard. If there were a teacher dashboard, that would be a very great feature to have. The administrative staff would like to view the data by teacher if possible. All data should be exportable to a CSV. The school would like the tool to integrate with PowerSchool and Illuminate if possible.

*Content From 2016

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