Reading Assistant is designed to be used by any student who has attained basic word recognition and decoding skills and is now building his/her vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. This includes students as young as first grade, all the way up to adults.

Reading Assistant has solutions designed to implement with Response to Intervention programs for all student tiers.

Reading Assistant helps students learn and retain vocabulary word meanings by providing:

• Audible syllabification
• Dictionary definition
• Contextual sentence
• Picture representation in most instances
• Spanish translation
• Did You Know? includes background knowledge about the word, Latin and Greek roots of the word, other meanings or uses of the word, cognate transfers from Spanish and other languages as well as fun facts to deepen vocabulary acquisition.

Reading fluency is the ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that one can focus attention on the meaning and message of the text.

Reading Assistant builds fluency by providing:

• Oral reading practice
• Supportive reading intervention: the program intervenes with a pronunciation of the word only when the student needs it.
• Repeated reading: students read each passage a minimum of 2 times.
• Review words: words the student needs to practice are highlighted.
• Feedback on fluency (words correct per minute)

Reading Assistant ensures reading comprehension by providing:

• Most guided reading selections contain several guided reading questions.
• Guided reading questions use reading strategies to build comprehension skillsincluding: using prior knowledge, identifying a reading purpose, prediction, making connections, visualization, monitoring and clarifying, retelling, summarizing, using context clues for meaning, asking questions.
• If a student does not answer the guided reading question correctly on the first attempt he/she will be prompted with hints guiding them with reading strategies.
• Take the Quiz is designed to assess comprehension for the entire guided reading selection.
• Quizzes assess the comprehension skills of inference, sequence, story events, theme, character traits, figurative language, important information, compare and contrast, author’s point of view, fact and opinion, diagrams, charts and graphs, cause and effect and main idea.
• The comprehension quiz also assesses student’s level of thinking in the following dimensions: literal, inferential, evaluation and analysis.

Yes. According to the report of the National Reading Panel, "classroom practices that encourage repeated oral reading with feedback and guidance leads to meaningful improvements in reading expertise for students—for good readers as well as those who are experiencing difficulty." With Reading Assistant, the computer becomes the supportive listener that ensures all students can regularly practice oral reading while receiving immediate, individual feedback from Scientific Learning's advanced speech verification software.

Yes. The impact of Reading Assistant on fluency growth was evaluated with mainstream students in Grades 2-5. Half of the classrooms in two schools used the software in thirty-minute sessions, once or twice a week over 17 weeks. Across all four grades, fluency gains were significantly greater for students who used the software than those who did not, averaging 43% (E.S.=0.91) greater than normative expectations over grades. Project sponsored by the Carlisle Foundation and NICHD.

Scientific Learning’s Progress Tracker reporting engine includes detailed tracking of the student’s performance using Reading Assistant.

• View Sample Reports

While students of all ages independently use the guided reading software after just a few sessions, we recommend direct observation of student sessions as well as regular monitoring of the reports to keep students on task and using their time wisely.

Our recommended protocol is:

K-3 – a minimum of 20 minutes 3 days per week

4-5 – a minimum of 30 minutes 3 days per week

6-8 - a minimum of 40 minutes 3 days per week

9-12 – a minimum of 40 minutes 3 days per week

Many of the Reading Assistant texts were originally published in one of the Carus™ family of magazines or by Lerner Publishing™. These Carus magazines include: Appleseeds™, Ladybug™, Spider™, Click!™, Cricket™, Odyssey™, Cobblestone™, Calliope™, and Faces™. Many of the guided reading selections were drawn from famous authors including Guy De Maupassant and O’Henry. Many more selections were written by great children’s authors.

The easiest placement option is to administer SLC’s Reading Progress Indicator. The RPI reading level will be used to place the student automatically at the appropriate content level.

If the school already established the student’s reading level, the teacher can use the reading level to place the student manually in the content.

Gateway provides for assignments based on Guided Reading level (D through Z) , Grade level Equivalent and the Lexile Framework for Reading®

The teacher can also assign guided reading selections to the student based on content topics/interest.

Our new Reading Assistant Expanded Edition content is structured to build knowledge and reading skills simultaneously. Each grade band is designed to cover topics that are relevant to the national content standards in that grade band. Each grade band of content contains topics at struggling through on level reading levels.

Grade Band	K-3	4-5	6-8	9-12
Reading Level	1-3	1-5	2-8	3-adult

Each topic within a grade band is designed to introduce vocabulary relevant to the topic standard and allow for multiple exposure of the new vocabulary in different contexts. Some guided reading selections provide background knowledge or extend the ideas of another selection or present the same set of ideas but in different contexts or from different points of view. Many of the guided reading selections include content from science, social studies, or literature standards for the grade band.

For example, in our grade band 6-8, our topic on the Grand Canyon contains the following guided reading selections:

 

G4 Mid	The Grand Canyon	Earth Science: Geography and geology	These selections present history, geology, geography, and mathematics against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon’s vastness and beauty.
	The Grand Canyon	Expository Nonfiction	Nonfiction; geology, beauty of Canyon
	John Wesley Powell: American Explorer	Biography	Biography of J.W. Powell, 1st geologist to explore Canyon
	John Powell's Grand Canyon	Journal	Authentic journal excerpts from J. W. Powell
	Grand Canyon Math	Nonfiction	Nonfiction, math: Understanding Canyon statistics

See how the topic of the Grand Canyon is explored from different perspectives and how relevant and important academic content is taught throughout the selections.

• Predictable text
• Realistic fiction
• Historical fiction
• Science fiction
• Poetry
• Folktale, myth, legend
• Expository nonfiction
• Biography
• Play
• Speech
• Jokes
• Short Story
• Point-counterpoint
• Personal Narrative
• Journal; eye-witness account

The comprehension questions are designed to review main ideas, key concepts, core arguments, and vocabulary from the passage. The question types include inferential and literal comprehension, analysis, prediction, and summary.

Yes. In addition to the features of Read to Me, Show Vocabulary, Record My Reading, and Play My Reading, Reading Assistant Expanded Edition allows the teacher to enable Spanish language support for a student. When this feature is activated, the glossary will contain an Español button which displays the glossary term in Spanish and plays a Spanish audio file. The student will also receive all program instructions in Spanish.

The Reading Assistant has in-depth audio support. Students can click on any word to hear it pronounced. Advanced speech verification technology provides just in time coaching to students pronouncing the word when students are struggling.

Strong visuals throughout the Reading Assistant support mental model development.

Reading Assistant is focused on academic vocabulary development with over 10,000 terms defined in depth. Reading Assistant Expanded Edition contains the Did You Know? feature which includes many instructional resources proven to be helpful in supporting vocabulary development in English Language Learners including:

• Greek and Latin roots
• Other meanings and usage for the word
• Fun facts about the word
• Cognate transfers from Spanish

The Reading Assistant content is structured to build knowledge through repeated exposure to vocabulary. Each grade band topic builds knowledge and depth of understanding of vocabulary.

The Reading Assistant content is filled with US cultural content (Internet, skateboarding, US Constitution).

Yes. What does this mean? Among assistive features: a) visual dialog boxes can be displayed whenever you hear an audio message; b) the colors in the application have been selected to accommodate people who are color blind; c) the preferences set by a student on his or her computer for text colors and size take precedence over those already set in Reading Assistant; d) the software will work in conjunction with a single switch device; e) there is high contrast between user interface elements and high rollover contrast for maximum visibility; f) the minimum font size used for all content text throughout the product is 16 point; g) tooltips are provided throughout the product; and h) the user can tab from element to element, and select the element using a key-activated shortcut.