Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Struggling High School Readers

In a meeting with a client of mine this past week, an interesting topic came up: The void in materials and content to support struggling high school readers. The issue appears to be that the content, while aligned to the reading level, is not aligned appropriately to the age level. So struggling high school readers are reading content aimed at middle school kids as an example.

Well, you can imagine that would probably not be very stimulating for the high schooler and a probable outcome would be a high level of disinterest and thus slower improvement. According to people I spoke with, there is a huge void that no one is filling for this particular problem.

As we further discussed this concept, another "want" that came out was an intuitive solution that could assess a student's mastery prior to delivering content to assist in the remediation effort. This could be based on a number of items, that could be called flags that the reading solution could recognize and then personalize the delivery of the content. My thought is that the flags would likely come from a formative assessment solution that was based on standards. The standards that were not mastered, could be the flags that the reading solution could recognize and use to personalize the content.

Such a situation would require a learning framework of applications that natively talked to each other. The reading solution would have to be able to access data from a formative assessment solution to personalize the reading content on the fly. As well, the formative assessment solution would have to talk to the student information system to get the most recent class rosters. Such a solution does not exist in totality yet, but there are several companies working to build these connected ERP systems specific to education.

As education moves forward, any such solution should be based on state, national and international standards, such as the specific state's standards, NCES, SCORM and the Dublin Core. This will allow other companies to build snap-in application that can complement such structures and provide specific functionality above and beyond what I am calling the education ERP. This is what I commonly refer to as Open Standards.

Social stigma came out as well during the conversation. It was very apparent that the students would need to have anytime anywhere access and anonymous access for the remediation to be successful. Points like this, highlight the difficult job educators face of truly delivering individualized education. The technology is available. It is up to educators to begin demanding this of their vendor solutions and searching out those vendors and technologies that can fundamentally support school improvement, not make it more difficult.