Striving Readers Program

The goals of the national Striving Readers grant is to improve literacy learning outcomes, increase the use of data analysis to inform decision making and increase the implementation of effective literacy instruction. Vantage Learning can aid your district in meeting these goals with the Vantage Accountability Solution.

The Vantage Accountability Solution can help your district by allowing educators to make informed decisions based on real-time data to drive one-to-one instruction. We can help you address specific proposal/grant responsibilities including the following:

Effective literacy instruction: MY Access!® is an instructional writing and assessment platform that transforms writing instruction and assessment by applying superior artificial intelligence and linguistic technologies to the writing process. It engages students by providing immediate, detailed and developmentally-appropriate prescriptive feedback to their writing. This feedback includes revision plans with examples to help students focus revision, recommendations for improvement and identification of errors in grammar, style and mechanics.

Professional development: Vantage Learning’s well-structured, focused professional development strategies foster school improvement on a long-term basis. Our team’s research-based and innovative programs are designed to improve student achievement by addressing specific instructional and student needs. This dynamic professional development ensures deep implementation of best practices by making the best use of new technologies and applying them to data collection, assessment and instruction.

Ongoing formative and summative assessments: The state of Montana recently wrote MY Access! into their Striving Readers Grant proposal as the writing assessment for the project, but thousands of other classrooms across the country use MY Access! for ongoing skill-building and assessment. Other states, like Virginia and Florida, are using a platform based on the Student Progress Monitoring System®, or SPMS, to assess their incoming college students.

SPMS is a web-based Adaptive Learning Platform™ which uses Computer Adaptive Testing for conducting continuous cross-curricular student skill evaluations. It can be used to perform summative assessments, but its true gift is the ability to manage the formative process and distinguish what a student knows– or doesn’t know– down to the objective level. Once an assessment is completed, it delivers a Personalized Adaptive Learning Plan™, or PALPs, to provide the best intervention prescription for immediate remediation.

Use data to inform instruction: MY Access! gives teachers a clear understanding of where their students need help. Educators can make timely, data-driven decisions for successful differentiated instruction and motivate students to write more frequently by providing them with immediate feedback.

PALPs delivered from SPMS provide the best prescription to each student at the time of the assessment, eliminating the lag time between assessment and intervention. The resources delivered are unique to each student and can be differentiated based upon multiple indicators from within a student’s profile. At the same time, teachers receive immediate online and offline test results, allowing for multiple, real-time opportunities to redirect instruction to meet the needs of individuals.

Monitor student progress: With a direct connection to iSEEK Supercruncher™, results from SPMS and MY Access! are easily matched with any dataset for identification of students’ unique needs, by school, teacher or sub-group. iSEEK is a data management system which unifies data, allowing users to ask complex, multi-conditional questions to get simple, actionable answers. The ability to understand the results of measurable assessments and standards-aligned benchmarks is key in identifying problem areas and implementing improvement strategies.

Aligning to standards: MY Access! has more than 1,300 writing topics in math, science, language arts and social studies that are aligned to state or common core standards. Additionally, teachers have the ability to create their own prompts matching specific curriculum needs. SPMS is also aligned to state and common core standards, ensuring that high-quality questions are used consistently.

Rationale for proposed technology programs: MY Access! users achieve, on average, a 17 percent improvement in holistic and domain-specific writing scores in as few as three engagements.