“Our data is showing that students are growing at three times the rate of the national norm — so they’re getting three years of growth for every year — on standardized tests because rather than do what most curricula do, which is start at simple text, we’re able to start at complex text and really focus in on that.”
This interview is part of our Spotlight Series, learning more about the work of education innovators, practitioners, and researchers. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Matt Pasternack: Can you start off by telling me what Riveting Results does?
Arthur Unobskey: What Riveting Results does is tackle what for high school teachers is an incredibly challenging task. Nationally, 69% of entering ninth graders read below grade level. And so in a typical English class, which is typically heterogeneous, a teacher looks out at the classroom and sees more than two-thirds of their kids below grade level and then a third at or above grade level. So they’ve got to teach all these kids, and these kids can range from reading at third-grade level all the way up to 12th-grade level, and they’re all in that same ninth-grade English class. And you may have 25 to 30 of those kids. The standards across the country expect you to teach grade-level text to them, complex text.
So, how do you make it possible for that to happen? First of all, you need to understand why so many kids are stuck at fifth-grade reading level. It’s because of what happens between fifth and sixth grade, in which sentences change from simple sentences to complex sentences, and they get longer. The foundation of their skills for learning to read in early elementary are based on phonics, phonemic awareness, sight words, and then, finally, fluency.
That fluency breaks down when they start getting into sixth grade and they start tripping over these longer sentences with clauses — complex sentences — and they get stuck, and what they do is they start cheating. They start to look for the simple sentences in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade to help them understand with context what those longer sentences are, and that kind of works. You see kids testing out, maybe they’re sixth-grade level or seventh-grade level, but they’ve never learned how to read complex text.
And so by the time they get to ninth grade, they have no facility with it, and those simple sentences have decreased significantly in number, so they cannot read what is put in front of them. And that means they get disengaged and bored — whether it’s science, history, even math, but particularly in English class, because they can’t read the kinds of sophisticated literature that adolescents want to read. So the teacher’s stuck.
So what we did is took that big blocker, which is fluency, and then three other high-leverage literacy activities and put them into software. So the teacher can take a really engaging, challenging, rigorous novel and teach the whole book to the whole class at the same time. They’re all reading the same book but have activities that she can personalize.
Different kids are doing slightly different things, practicing the same skills, but at slightly different levels so that they can all participate in really dynamic discussions and partner activities that the teacher leads and the computer software helps guide students. All the work goes through that software, so what happens is that students are spending a hundred percent of their time reading complex text.
So even if you’re at a fourth-grade level, the exciting thing about reading is, it’s not like math — you can actually skip levels, because if you can read something fluently — our first activity allows kids to practice their fluency and develop it — you can get to the point where you can kind of understand a ninth-grade-level text very quickly, within even a matter of minutes, but really become comfortable with complex text within a matter of a few months. And then if you do the other activities, you can really understand complex text, the whole book worth, if you support that with other activities.
So our data is showing that students are growing at three times the rate of the national norm — so they’re getting three years of growth for every year — on standardized tests.
Read the full interview with Arthur Unobskey on our blog.