The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is multi-faceted. Reading comprehension is an essential life skill, which needs to be assessed in middle and high school. If teachers are provided a quick, easy process to assess students' comprehension ability and get on-time feedback regarding student areas of need, they can more easily adjust instruction based on student needs which may impact reading abilities of struggling students and general education students. ACE (Adolescent Comprehension Evaluation) may also help districts to improve overall reading scores of students and impact the results of state standardized assessments. In addition, as comprehension is also essential in many careers, employers may be looking for a way to determine if applicants are able to comprehend the necessary material to perform their duties. ACE may be able to provide that opportunity. Lastly, the medical field is searching for a process to determine if patients understand the information presented to them regarding certain medicines or procedures. The process used in ACE may be applicable in this area.
This I-Corps project is currently being validated using a patent-pending, multifaceted set of procedures. ACE includes 60 original passages for grades six through eight with 10 questions for each passage. A teacher dashboard provides immediate data that can be used to flexibly group students and differentiate in order to improve students' reading comprehension. Think Aloud protocols validate the patterned distractors for each of the reading comprehension questions. In what is believed to be the first use of brain-based technology in internal structure validation, ACE represents an innovation in the assessment space. The multidimensional validation process includes the use of fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) technology which allows making an evidence-based claim that the test questions are text-based and less influenced by background knowledge than other assessments. This is a critical need in an educational landscape where student cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity influences the outcomes of assessments. ACE uses weighted answers to its reading comprehension questions, to allow for partial credit. This means that ACE provides a more sensitive measure of growth than other assessments. Each of the weighted answers corresponds to a specific error in thinking, which means ACE gives teachers near instant feedback that can be used for instruction, intervention, and student groupings.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
