Currently, students are identified as needing additional educational support using a'wait-to-fail' approach, i.e., waiting until a child has not made expected gains in reading before there is a reevaluation of their instructional needs.

Models for student reading performance can empower educators and institutions to proactively identify at-risk students, thereby enabling early and tailored instructional interventions. However, there are no suitable publicly available educational datasets for modeling and predicting future reading performance. In this work, we introduce the Enhanced Core Reading Instruction ECRI dataset, a novel large-scale longitudinal tabular dataset collected across 44 schools with 6,916 students and 172 teachers. We leverage the dataset to empirically evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art machine learning models to recognize early childhood educational patterns in multivariate and partial measurements. Specifically, we demonstrate a simple self-supervised strategy in which a Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) network is pre-trained over masked inputs to outperform several strong baselines while generalizing over diverse educational settings. To facilitate future developments in precise modeling and responsible use of models for individualized and early intervention strategies, our data and code are available at https://ecri-data.github.io/.

It's often seen as a lazy activity, but new research suggests that playing video games could have a surprising benefit – improving your reading skills. Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan say that gaming may improve peripheral attention skills, which are essential for reading ability. 'Attention is an important part of successful reading,' explained Shaylyn Kress, who led the study. 'Your eyes need to scan across a page in a systematic manner to correctly process each word and sentence, for example. 'Therefore, activities which may impact attentional processes, such as video games, may also have an impact on reading as well.'

The aim of the TextAD research project at Linköping University is to better understand different types of reading difficulties. This knowledge can be used to develop digital tools that automatically adapt texts to the needs of readers. For many people, reading can be difficult, and some people need texts adapted to their ability. This group is very diverse, and the aspects of reading that cause problems differ from one individual to another. The project will investigate how three groups aged 13-17 years (pupils with dyslexia, pupils with intellectual disabilities, and typical readers) understand texts that present factual information.

No shortage of articles and reports describe the many problems we face daily as Americans: immigration, natural disasters, wars, racism, sexism, and shootings. It's easy to get lost in the sheer number of crises, paralyzing to even contemplate what do to next. Worse, we can fall into the trap of negativity, overwhelmed by all that must be done to fix our problems. "It's a huge problem in the U.S.," the founder and CEO of Learning Ovations Jay Connor told my coauthor Neil Sahota and I during an interview for our upcoming book, Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked: A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business. "Less than 50 percent of our children are reading at grade level, and if you're dealing with high-need or high-poverty populations, in some locations, like our schools in New York, it's below 20 percent."

About 10 percent of the U.S. population suffers from dyslexia, a condition that makes learning to read difficult. Dyslexia is usually diagnosed around second grade, but the results of a new study from MIT could help identify those children before they even begin reading, so they can be given extra help earlier. The study, done with researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, found a correlation between poor pre-reading skills in kindergartners and the size of a brain structure that connects two language-processing areas. Previous studies have shown that in adults with poor reading skills, this structure, known as the arcuate fasciculus, is smaller and less organized than in adults who read normally. However, it was unknown if these differences cause reading difficulties or result from lack of reading experience.

A recent newcomer at one of the home-education groups my family attends explained that one of the frustrations that led her to take her son out of the school system was that he wasn't being allowed to write stories. It's something he loves to do, and it seems strange that a school should obstruct that enthusiasm. But the teachers declared he wasn't ready because he can't yet write in cursive. To me this symbolizes all that is wrong with the strange obsession shared in many countries about how children learn to write. Often we teach them how to form letters based on the ones they see in their earliest reading books. And then we tell them that they must learn this hard-won skill all over again, using "joined-up" script. Yet there is no evidence that cursive has any benefits over other handwriting styles, such as manuscript, where the letters aren't joined, for the majority of children with normal development.