Free SAS® Reading Records app teaches early readers anytime, anywhere
Charts student and classroom reading progress over time
A new, free app from SAS lets students practice reading skills in or out of the classroom and enables teachers to monitor results from anywhere. More accessible and time-efficient than traditional approaches, SAS Reading Records helps young students gain the reading skills they will need to excel in future learning.
“Before third grade, you’re learning to read. After, you’re reading to learn,” said Scott McQuiggan, Director of SAS Curriculum Pathways. “SAS Reading Records equips teachers and students with information to help achieve the critical milestone of third-grade reading proficiency.”
A running record of a student’s reading is critical to informing individualized instruction. But that requires teachers to sit individually with students and evaluate performance as students read aloud. With today’s large class sizes, allocating up to 15 minutes for each student is simply too time-consuming, meaning assessments can’t be administered often enough.
With SAS Reading Records, educators can assign, evaluate and analyze reading performance without being one-on-one with a student. And the student interface lets young readers complete assignments, view their results, and monitor their progress from anywhere.
“Teachers regularly tell us they wish they had time to do more, particularly for struggling readers,” said McQuiggan. “SAS Reading Records adds needed flexibility, with capabilities beyond the traditional paper-and-pencil approach, that reduce errors and give teachers back valuable time.”
The software uses SAS analytics and data visualization software to chart student and classroom performance over time. Educators can pinpoint problem areas and intervene to help students become proficient readers.
Through the main dashboard, teachers create classes, add students and assign passages. The app records the student’s voice as he reads. To gauge comprehension, the student is also recorded retelling the story in his own words and responding to quiz questions, referring back to the text as necessary. After submitting the recordings, the student receives teacher feedback and grades via the student dashboard.
Currently available via iOS and the web, SAS Reading Records includes an expansive library loaded with fiction and non-fiction passages, all rated for reading difficulty with a Lexile measure. Each passage comes with illustrations, a comprehension quiz with both multiple-choice and open-ended questions, and a prompt asking students to retell what they’ve just read. Users can also create their own passages and comprehension quizzes.
In the teacher interface, teachers see all assignments completed and ready for evaluation. They listen to a student’s recording, mark up the text accordingly, assess the student’s overall fluency, view the automatically graded quiz, and see all relevant statistics in real time.
Free apps for teaching and learning fundamentals
SAS offers other free apps that help young learners gain fundamental skills. More than 80,000 books have been read on SAS Read Aloud, which teaches and guides early readers. Parents, teachers and students can record themselves reading the book of their choice from a growing collection of nearly 50 books. Readers see words highlighted as the familiar voice speaks them.
SAS Math Stretch fosters early math literacy, teaching students in grades K-5 how to think about numbers in new ways associated with success in higher-order math, such as algebra. SAS Math Stretch and SAS Read Aloud have been downloaded more than 10,000 and 7,000 times, respectively.
In addition to the many SAS digital learning resources, SAS analytics and business intelligence software is used at more than 3,000 educational institutions worldwide for teaching, research and administration. SAS has more than three decades of experience working with educational institutions.
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