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Edgewood Campus School in Madison kindergartener Ethan Stacey completes an assessment through the APPRISE project, which measures school readiness and dyslexia risk. |
MADISON — “If there ever was a year to say no, this was the year,” said Kim VanBrocklin, a kindergarten teacher at Edgewood Campus School in Madison who spent part of the fall semester of 2020 piloting the new APPRISE app with her students.
But neither VanBrocklin nor Principal Anne Palzkill let the pandemic get in the way of the way of helping researchers to develop a new tool to identify children at risk for developing dyslexia and other reading disabilities before they start struggling in school.
“I think someday, in the next five or 10 years maybe, [APPRISE] will be a household name,” said VanBrocklin, comparing the reading screener app to tools schools use to screen for vision and hearing problems. “So, this is like a history in the making opportunity for the school.”
About the project
APPRISE stands for “Application for Readiness in Schools and Learning Evaluation” and is a “gamified” reading screener app currently in the final stages of development.
The APPRISE project is being led by Professors Fumiko Hoeft and Devin Hearns at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and John Gabrieli at MIT.
Hoeft is an internationally known researcher on the neuroscience of dyslexia and is the director of the Brain Imagining Research Center at the university. Kearns is also an acclaimed researcher on early literacy and dyslexia.
Together, the three researchers have been aiming to develop, validate, and distribute the APPRISE app, a tool that will serve as a free universal reading screener intended for children ages four to eight.
“The APPRISE app helps teachers, pediatricians, and parents assess dyslexia risk, school readiness, and other learning disabilities that will allow for early intervention,” Hoeft said in a statement.
“Children engage in research-based, child-friendly games through individual or small group administration. The app evaluates skills such as response time, working memory, processing speed, and nonverbal IQ.”
While the screener won’t replace a diagnostic assessment, the hope is that the tool will lead to early interventions.
Joining the project
“I became involved when I went to a workshop in Boston where they were looking for teachers to pilot the app,” said VanBrocklin, referring to the workshop she attended before the pandemic.
After getting permission from her principal, she signed up her class to pilot the program.
Around late October, each student in the class received a Kindle Fire from UConn along with special wipes and plastic bags.
These individual Kindles ensured that students were only touching their own device, minimizing the exposure to each other’s germs.
“We had 100 percent participation,” said VanBrocklin. “They want to get an authentic view of how children are performing with literacy.”
The actual screening took around 10 to 15 minutes.
“We got four to six kids done a day,” VanBrocklin said. “But they had to go through rounds of testing for validity, so it took a couple of months.”
After the pilot testing was done, the Kindles were mailed back to UConn.
“One thing that I think is so great about this project — and it’s really a Catholicity piece — this app is meant to be available to all schools free of charge,” said Palzkill.
“I was so blown away when I met with Kim and the researchers. They actually have IT people working on converting it so that it can be used worldwide.”
Praise for the program
VanBrocklin offered her own praise for the program, agreeing that the free component of the app appealed to her.
“There are a lot of underserved children in different communities around the United States,” she said. “This would offer everybody the same playing field.”
With the success of the pilot program in the kindergarten classroom, other classrooms at Edgewood Campus School will be joining the pilot program as well.
“The other teachers saw what [VanBrocklin] was doing, so now because of her good work, our 4K teachers and first-grade teachers are all part of the research study,” said Palzkill.
“They are going to start with the research study after spring break. It is going to be a lot of wonderful data that we can get back to tailor instruction. That’s exciting.”
Palzkill also shared her appreciation for “Kim’s energy around this — Not only that she could partner with our families, but to get our staff on board and to have our other teachers join her is really exciting. It really has made a great difference in our primary teams. Her energy and enthusiasm about it has been fantastic.”
There is no word yet as to when the pilot program will be complete for the app to be officially released.
The pandemic has caused some delays, but the researchers are still accepting more school partnerships for the fall of 2021 to pilot the app.
For more information on the APPRISE project, visit www.appriseproject.org