By: Brian Swanberg

Educational researchers, businesses, and policymakers are calling for more initiatives that help prepare students for the complex, adapting problems that humanity faces in the 21st century, like world hunger or climate change [3]. To solve these problems, independent learning is critical. Reading is a primary medium to grow as a learner, but students often don’t have the reading comprehension skills for the content they should or need to read. These problems can cause students to feel overwhelmed and develop conditions that may hamper their performance and confidence as learners. Without treatment, they may not reach their full potential as lifelong learners and professionals, and our ability as a global community to resolve world problems will be hampered.

Existing solutions like tutoring and working memory reduction programs will often help students become better readers, but do not thoroughly address underlying psychological biases and existing conditions that the user may face, which may make them less effective.

Despite some “modern” policy implementations and the education technology boom within private tutoring and reading tools, average reading comprehension scores among American students are unaffected. In the past 30 years, secondary school reading and learning outcomes have stagnated [2], and in the last 5 years, outcomes have decreased for high school seniors [7]. This information (including my personal observations) indicates that there are likely solutions that could better address this problem, and some ‘great’ solutions like Khan Academy are not enough. I want to create something radical, something better.

I developed a product, reworded, that acts as a reading comprehension study assistant. It will help users understand readings directly from the source. reworded combines aspects of both cognitive load and tutoring services in a way that provides feedback on user understanding and helps build student confidence.

Want to learn more information? Fill out this form or email me: [email protected]

Read previous articles: Part I, Part II, Part III

Note: sources are cited in the Further Reading article