The Foundations Learning System Diagnostic was developed under contract with the U.S. Department of Education under the product name “iASK.” The following describes the development project and its findings.
The Iowa Assessment of Skills and Knowledge for Automatic Word Recognition and Decoding (iASK)
Foundations in Learning was awarded Phase I and Phase II research and development funding from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences under award #ED-IES-15-C-0023. The SBIR award was for the development of iASK, an online diagnostic assessment that better differentiates reading problems to target the appropriate interventions.
iASK identifies students who lack the requisite foundational reading skills required for reading comprehension, as well as those who may have some or many of the skills but cannot use them efficiently enough for fluent reading. In addition, iASK helps determine what intervention is most appropriate for these students. Foundations in Learning organized an impressive team to help solve this most important problem. Dr. Carolyn Brown and Dr. Jerry Zimmermann of Foundations in Learning served as co-Principal Investigators on the project. Drs. Bob McMurray and Eliot Hazeltine from the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychology and Delta Center and Dr. Deborah Reed from the University of Iowa’s College of Education and the Iowa Reading Research Center served as scientists on the project. The project was completed in the spring of 2017.
Many middle school struggling readers have deficits in foundational skills, including word recognition. The problem is compounded because they are no longer given reading assessments that test these foundational skills – current assessments measure only gross outcomes in word recognition and fluency, not the diverse skills and knowledge that support such outcomes. In addition, middle school teachers are usually not trained to identify these reading deficits. They need a more complete and detailed picture of reading deficits in order to target the most appropriate intervention.
“Middle school students who struggle to read is a growing need in schools across the country,” says Dr. Carolyn Brown, Foundations in Learning’s Co-Founder. “In some of the school districts we serve, as many as fifty to sixty percent of these struggling students lack these foundational reading skills.”
The project developed a new assessment of students’ knowledge of sound-to-spelling regularities and the skills in which it is embedded. By crossing these factors in a cognitive science framework, the Iowa Assessment of Skills and Knowledge for Automatic Word Recognition and Decoding (iASK) offers a multi-dimensional picture of students’ reading difficulties to help precisely target intervention to achieve automatic word recognition. iASK uses an internet-based platform for efficiency and fidelity, while enabling diverse tasks and items for a multi-dimensional assessment.
Phase I developed a prototype of iASK. A study of students and teachers found it to be feasible and usable, and found evidence of both validity and reliability. Phase II built the complete diagnostic and assesses its reliability and validity, comparing iASK with a battery of standardized tests in two cohorts of middle school students. Phase II also examined its feasibility for middle school classrooms and the utility of its data and reporting in supporting instructional decision making. Phase III, which was completed outside of the IES SBIR-funded research and development project, finalized iASK for deployment and widespread usage by teachers and students.
The results of the Phase I and Phase II projects demonstrate the clear validity and reliability of iASK as a comprehensive assessment of middle school reading deficits. These research projects allowed us to optimize the design of iASK through iterative testing, to ensure effective measurement of student abilities in as rapid a time as possible.
Through comparison with standard measures of decoding and automaticity, we found that iASK effectively captures these constructs within a single assessment, while also measuring subcomponents of each. This provides individualized profiles of reading abilities for each student. Additionally, these computed scores provide diagnostic assessment of decoding and automaticity, offering a straightforward recommendation of which students would benefit from intervention. iASK not only provides a way to diagnose whether struggling middle school students have word-level reading problems, it identifies specific gaps in these foundational reading skills. Using the output of iASK, teachers and interventionists can attack the reading roadblocks of these at-risk students with more precisely targeted intervention.
These studies also demonstrated high test-retest reliability of iASK, demonstrating its potential for use as a gauge of progress during the school year. Multiple forms of iASK can be administered to the same student to effectively compare their risk factors and profile of skills before and after intervention.
Dr. Carolyn BrownandDr. Jerry Zimmermann, Co-Principal Investigators, are the Co- Founders of Foundations in Learning (FIL) and adjunct professors in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. Dr. Brown is the President of FIL and Dr. Zimmermann is VP for Research. Over the past 30 years, they have researched and developed educational solutions based on learning theory. Dr. Brown led all aspects of the development and testing of iASK; Dr. Zimmermann oversaw the scientific research process.
Dr. Keith Apfelbaum, Director of Research for FIL earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Iowa and served as a postdoctoral scholar at Ohio State University before joining the team at FIL. His research has investigated the cognitive underpinnings and mechanisms of learning, with particular focus on how domain-general cognitive principles come to bear in specific domains, especially reading and language development. As part of the iASK team, he assisted with design, item selection and data analysis, and he helped produce the algorithms used to convert student performance into diagnostic scores.
Eric Soride, Chief Technology Officer for FIL, has deep experience in every aspect of managing the development process for educational software and curricula. He supervised all technology development including project management of the engineering, acceptance testing, creation of hosting environment, and product deployment.
Amy VanHoosieris FIL’s Rapid Development Engineer. VanHoosier has over 20 years of experience in software development and specializes in rapid product prototyping, user interface and interaction design, and refining requirements for educational products. She designed the fully functional iASK prototypes for testing and specification for production-ready development.
Patty Benzingserved as the on-site research coordinator for the school based research.
Dr. Bob McMurray, Co-Investigator, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Iowa. His NIH and NSF funded research examines learning, language acquisition, reading, speech perception and word learning. He has a long-term collaboration with FIL and Hazeltine on learning and reading. He brought skills in experimental design, statistics, and the theoretical model that undergirds iASK. Much of his research examines individual differences including children with specific language impairment, cochlear implant users, and struggling readers. He has experience relating complex experimental measures to standardized assessments, and models of the interaction between real-time skills and knowledge. McMurray collaborated on the design of tasks and items, and design and implement the quantitative research.
Dr. Eliot Hazeltine, Co-Investigator, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Iowa. He has expertise in the impact of task demands on learning, on the role of practice, and the impact of item similarity, and most importantly on complex skill acquisition. He has been collaborating with FIL and Dr. McMurray on learning and reading. On this project, he informed the interpretation of results, and the tasks and items that comprise iASK and participated in the design and analysis of the quantitative research.
Dr. Deborah Reed, Co-Investigator, is the Director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. Formerly, Dr. Reed was an Assistant Professor with the School of Teacher Education at Florida State University and the Florida Center for Reading Research. She has spent over 20 years in reading education as a teacher, technical assistance provider, and researcher. Dr. Reed served as PI of the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academies and the subsequent validation study (Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment). Dr. Reed served as co-PI on projects for the IES-funded Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast and as a Project Director for the NICHD funded Texas Center for Learning Disabilities. Dr. Reed led the feasibility and utility studies of iASK, and assisted with the assessment development and validation.
Dr. Kristian Markon, psychometrics consultant, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Iowa. He is an expert on test design, statistical analysis, psychometrics and dimensional models of individual differences. He consulted on psychometric issues with iASK and on the analysis of the reliability and validity data.
