Starting next fall, the state of California will mandate universal screening for reading difficulties in kindergarten, first, and second grades. When reading difficulties are identified early, schools can determine what support students need as they progress through their education and they are less likely to fall behind. The new policy approved four reading assessments for districts to use to screen their students: one, conceived and developed at Stanford.

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), founded by Stanford Accelerator for Learning Faculty Affiliate Jason Yeatman, is an automated, fully online tool that enables schools to test their entire student body in the time it normally takes them to test one student. The tool, which has been shown to be highly predictive of gold standard reading screeners in validation studies, is free, open-access, and currently being used in hundreds of schools in 23 states. Assessment data is stored securely and separately from identifiers wherever possible, and schools receive interactive score reports in real time to support their instruction. The ROAR research team also creates professional development tools to help teachers interpret and use the test results.

The Accelerator has helped ROAR expand its reach and strengthen its infrastructure by providing engineering and technical support, facilitating and brokering school and district partnerships, and helping refine its scaling approach.

After nearly four years of research and development, and expanding its library of assessments to test a range of skills in reading and language, visual processing, and executive function, ROAR is going to scale, as schools around the state of California and the country clamor to use it. We spoke with Yeatman, who is an associate professor of education, pediatrics, and psychology at Stanford, about this pivotal moment for the tool.

What need was ROAR designed to fill?

We have a dual mission: there is a service and impact side and then a research side. The high-level mission that really excites me is building more bridges between research and practice, by aligning the questions that researchers are asking to real challenges faced by educators, and then creating a pipeline to bring that cutting-edge research into practice.

Our goal when it comes to schools is to lift the resource constraint for reading assessment, which is typically time consuming and resource intensive. It conventionally involves teachers administering assessments one-on-one to every student in the class, scoring those assessments, and entering those scores into a database so the data can be used for making decisions. Teachers have to spend hours training and schools have to create complex systems for how assessments are done. This means a lot of resources are being spent on professional development and data collection as opposed to what’s really important: using the data to help kids. Now, schools can spend 20 minutes to deploy ROAR across the whole district and get automated scores in real time. Teachers immediately see that information and can start using it to make instructional decisions.

Can you talk about ROAR’s journey to achieving this milestone towards scale? 

I see this milestone as an exciting opportunity to connect research, practice, and policy. This new policy, to test all young readers in the state, emerged from the advocacy work of the dyslexia community around California; many other states had similar legislation already. I would really like to see more connections between ongoing research, policy, and what’s making it into schools.

When the call for applications came out last summer, there was a window of about eight weeks to submit the application. During that time, that application was my personal focus, with support from the whole ROAR team, because we wanted ROAR to be on the table as an option for schools in our home state. It opened up an incredible opportunity to do the same work we’ve been doing, but at a much larger scale.

As the years go by, a larger goal of mine is to help schools go beyond just complying with existing legislation and work with them to be a part of crafting future policies. These are the partnerships that are most exciting for me, when forward-thinking districts work with researchers to build a more effective system of support – maybe we’ll look up in five years and have a new policy that is crafted by these learnings.

How have your partnerships with schools impacted the development of ROAR? 

We are a team of cognitive neuroscientists that are studying the variety of interacting factors that lead to challenges with reading, and we’re trying to gain a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to reading development. Sometimes we come in with our own hypotheses and look for schools that might be interested in exploring them with us, but we also try to bring schools into the collaborative co-design of our research questions.

Our current research is the synthesis of many ideas and challenges that schools are facing, where they want better answers to their pressing challenges. As a concrete example, a big focus right now is understanding best practices for supporting multilingual learners. This is a question that teachers face and that school administrators face, depending on the educational context in the school. This has really propelled ROAR toward developing and validating assessments across multiple languages. I’m thinking with the schools about how to best combine the data from these various measures to support their teachers.

How has ROAR helped us do better research?

ROAR allows us to do research at a previously unprecedented scale and make sure that we’re doing research that reflects the true diversity of learners around the United States. Now, when my lab poses a research question, we can make sure that our study is not just a convenience sample of students in Palo Alto, but really reflects the diversity of students around the country, teachers around the country, and the diversity of experiences that students are having.

ROAR is also supporting research beyond our lab. For instance, ROAR has been used by researchers at other universities that study brain development and reading, to collect assessment data before participants come into the lab. It’s also been used by international researchers that are interested in comparing reading development across languages and instructional contexts.

What do you hope ROAR’s impact will be?

It’s a dance between scale and impact, and over what timeline. For me, research is the best way to have a long-term impact. ROAR isn’t just for grades K-2, it was designed and validated for use up to grade 12 to screen for reading challenges. We want districts to not just test kids in K-2 to comply with legislation, but we want them to screen in upper elementary and middle school as well, because we know a lot of students are slipping through the cracks. That’s one way that I hope research will have an impact: making sure that a second grader who was flagged as having serious reading challenges receives extra support, and doesn’t become the third grader, fourth grader, or fifth grader who hasn’t had the opportunity to achieve their full potential. While I’d like for ROAR to be on the approved screener list in every state in the country, it goes beyond getting ROAR to the largest number of people to how ROAR can bring a spotlight to this issue and impact the education system more broadly.

What comes next for ROAR? 

I see California’s adoption of ROAR as ushering in a sea change in how the school system bridges research and practice, and an opportunity to improve equity and efficiency of screening for all the children of California. We’re offering a different model for districts, that’s not just purchasing a product from a company, but an opportunity to align their practices to research and be a part of steering future research, which in turn, means being a part of sculpting future products and policies. We also hope that over the next five years, ROAR will contribute to the development of new reading interventions to advance learning for all.

Learn more about ROAR.