The Covid-19 pandemic brought many unexpected challenges to the world of education and early literacy. Particularly, balancing student safety during the height of the pandemic with the quality and quantity of educational instruction was a key issue. Many schools pivoted to online instruction surrounding the March 2020 shutdowns in many cities across the United States. This decision brought it?s own challenges, namely how to best utilize the online format, particularly with young learners.

            During that time, the RAPID: Assessing and preventing detrimental impacts on literacy acquisition during COVID-19-related school closures grant allowed us to step in and work with many young learners whose reading instruction looked very different than we might have anticipated even a few months before. The goals of this project, referred to as the RESCUE project (REading Slide from Covid-19: Undoing the Effects) were two fold: first, we wanted to understand what impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on children?s knowledge of foundational literacy skills as it compares to typical slide in skills that we expect over the summer. Second, we wanted to test if a state-of-the-art, researcher-developed EdTech tool, here called GraphoLearn, could help to ameliorate this loss of learning. Specifically, we also sought to understand the profiles of children who benefitted most from the GraphoLearn program.

We offered GraphoLearn for free to 75,000 families around the country. We also had communications with over 875 participants? families/teachers. Ultimately 767 participants? parents signed the consent form, and 404 children were included in the research component. Student engagement was high and, qualitatively, most children reported enjoying a gamified reading program. Particularly, features such as designing one?s own character, the variety of activities in the game, and a mix of feedback and earning tokens increased participant enjoyment. This game, which is currently offered in multiple languages, is one possible way to increase engagement in learning the foundational reading skills needed to progress towards fluent reading. More information about game features can be found here: GraphoLearn US - Sample 1. More details about our project can be found here: RESCUE - Haskins Global Literacy Hub. 

In the first paper, we analyzed information from 172 children in grades K, 1^st, or 2^nd that performed both pre and post STAR Early Literacy assessment and had at least some GraphoLearn playing time. Our goal was to better understand which factors were important predictors of skill level after playing GraphoLearn. Our results suggest that playing GraphoLearn at home might have had a mitigating effect on expected reading loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, children with better initial word-reading skills, who played more units in a fixed number of days made significantly more reading progress. However, there is no claim that the program can substitute for individualized, and expert-supervised, reading remediation. Instead, this should be seen as evidence that GraphoLearn may be an engaging tool to be used with other forms of learning.

With this project, significant knowledge was gained in terms of how to support children's educational loss during COVID. This knowledge can be applied to other known educational losses, such as summer loss or other lockdowns. In addition, pre and post assessments were conducted via zoom, proctored by trained research assistants. Understanding the feasibility of virtual assessment is crucial to allow for future projects to expand how assessments are conducted, which in turn may lead to more diverse, representative sampling. Finally, despite not having complete data for all of the children who initially enrolled in the study, this free tool was provided to 75,000 children throughout the country, meaning that over 75,000 children had access to a fun tool to complement their online learning environment and which we hope helped them to better understand the important fundamentals of reading.