Students sit at their desks doing a reading assessment on tablets

Reading the room

A new online tool is radically transforming how to identify struggling young readers.

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The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading allows schools to quickly identify students with reading difficulties—starting as young as first grade.

“Detecting reading difficulties early is one of the most impactful things that can be done for a child in education,” says Jason Yeatman, associate professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education and Department of Psychology.

The hope is that, as we begin to understand the barriers for some kids, we can develop targeted interventions.”
Jason Yeatman, associate professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education and Department of Psychology

Stanford Accelerator for Learning: The impact

Why it matters

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), developed at Stanford’s Brain Development & Education Lab, enables school districts to assess entire student populations for struggling readers in the time it currently takes to run a standard assessment on a single student. This in turn allows educators to provide appropriate interventions far more quickly.

The opportunity

ROAR receives support from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which connects experts across the sciences, medicine, engineering, law, and the humanities to develop and scale solutions for the most pressing challenges facing learners of all kinds. Stanford Impact Labs is helping to further its work with a stage 2 “testing solutions” grant, which provides flexible funding for teams that have initial proof of concept to test the solution in real-world settings in collaboration with external partners.

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Go deeper on Stanford’s accelerator for learning

Learn how interdisciplinary teams are creating scalable, equitable solutions to the most pressing challenges in education.

Read the overview

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