The Smart Dose of Technology Can Help Heal America’s Literacy Problems

by Kerrie Rushton

A decade ago, preschool parents sought schools with one-to-one student-to-iPad ratios. Now, as their children navigate high school, these parents are advocates for school smartphone bans.

Mark Angel, co-founder and CEO of Amira Learning, which has produced an artificial intelligence (AI)-based literacy tutor, understands parents’ wariness. “We have absolutely overdosed children on screens,” said Angel. “What we need to do is find the right dose.”

Through research, Amira Learning believes it has determined the right dose.

Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but it was not until the 1970s that scientists began to understand how people learn to read. Technology — brain scans and eye-tracking technology — helped determine that good readers decode the sounds of each letter to decipher a word. Once a word is unlocked, it is encoded in a reader’s brain, easily retrieved the next time they encounter it.

Today, technology has taken another leap forward with AI. This tool can not only assess a student’s reading strengths and struggles and diagnose errors; it can turn data from that assessment into an individualized learning plan with tested intervention strategies and act as the tutor that implements that plan, and maps a path for continued growth.

The approach is based on research begun in 1993 at Carnegie Mellon University when computer science professor Dr. Jack Mostow launched Project LISTEN. A new father at the time, Mostow had been involved in research on automatic speech recognition.

“Mostow was able to see two generations ahead of where the technology was,” said Angel. “He imagined a world where speech recognition would be good enough to listen to children talk, where algorithms would be good enough to parse that speech and provide real-time, intelligent questions back to students, and where we could measure a student’s mastery of words.”

Flash forward to the 1996-97 school year when Project LISTEN piloted its reading tutor in an underserved urban elementary school. Six third graders who had started the term three years below grade level used the tutor with individual supervision. They averaged two years of reading progress in less than eight months. A year later, Project LISTEN had more than 100 elementary school children use the tutor daily in 10 classrooms under regular conditions. A four-month controlled study found these students made significant gains in reading comprehension compared to classmates who did not use the tutor.

Today, Amira Learning uses Project LISTEN’s intellectual property to transform outcomes for 5 million students in school districts across the United States.

“Reading is personal,” says Angel, who often shares his own experience as a child who moved frequently. “My parents had to work hard, so I got parked in public libraries. Books became an important part of my ability to cope with that transition.”

It is this personal connection to the power of reading that inspired him to connect his years of AI expertise to helping solve America’s literacy crisis. “I saw how advanced technology made a difference in more conventional areas and wanted to see how it could make a difference for kids by helping them attach to the power of books and connect with unique characters.”

One of the keys to success, Angel said, is for technology to provide an ultra-personalized approach. The Amira platform acts just as a patient, empathetic librarian, teacher, or parent would, interacting with elementary school readers at their developmental level and middle school readers with their pre-teenage mindset. “There is a need to support people on their own terms. Amira is a different tutor for a sixth grader than a second grader.”

With a background in health care, Angel sees a lot of parallels between how we think about learning: “All interventions have a dosage curve and you have to find that spot of efficacy.” Teachers often react in surprise when Amira advises that teachers limit student use to 40 minutes per week. (Beyond that, the positive returns diminish.) Less than an hour is sufficient. In fact, students who use Amira for 20-30 minutes a week show a 70% acceleration in reading growth, Angel said.

He also describes how Amira operates as a tutor with a point of view, one that supports the adoption of science of reading ideas that have had an amazing impact over the past ten years. Louisiana has risen from 50th in the country in 2019 in terms of student literacy to 16th, and Angel is proud of the part Amira has played in that transformation.

A study from Utah found the company’s technology had a “significant” positive effect on the literacy achievement of at risk learners in grades 1-3. Some students “dramatically outperformed” other students over time. (At-risk is defined as starting the academic year below expected reading level.) A study from the Teachers College at Columbia University found students who use Amira show significant vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension gains.

Angel is also thinking beyond the classroom, toward adult literacy where there is an exceptional need for interventions. Only 16% of Americans say they read for pleasure. Reading fluency may play a key role in that statistic. 

Researchers are also looking forward to insights gained through upcoming research by Digital Promise and the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education to explore how to help struggling readers by tapping into their linguistic and cultural backgrounds and help make Amira more sensitive to those factors.

“We are a company that leads with science and realizes the vision of using AI to advance learning,” Angel explains about the work Amira Learning is doing.