Growth in Reading Ability as a Response to EdSphere™

Educators are aggressively working to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Student use of technology is one potential key to
helping students meet higher reading standards proposed by the CCSS (National Education Technology Plan, 2010). Well-designed technology
includes components of deliberate practice. Research (Glaser, 1996; Kellogg, 2006; Shea & Paull, 1996; Wagner & Stanovich, 1996) suggests
that a novice develops into an expert through an intricate process that includes the following components: (a) targeted practice in which each
person is engaged in developmentally appropriate activities; (b) real-time scoring and corrective feedback that is based on each person’s
performance; (c) intensive practice on a daily basis that provides results to monitor contemporaneous ability; (d) distributed practice that
provides appropriate activities over a long period of time (e.g., 5–10 years, 10,000 hours), which allows for monitoring growth towards expert
performance; and (e) self-directed practice when a coach, teacher, or mentor is not available. Students benefit from these components of
deliberate practice when their day-to-day and year-to-year performance is placed on an equal-interval developmental scale. This essential
component allows for monitoring status and growth in response to deliberate practice.

EdSphere™, formerly known as Learning Oasis™ (Hanlon, Swartz, Stenner, Burdick, & Burdick, 2012) is a web-based application that leverages
the ability of The Lexile® Framework for Reading and The Lexile® Framework for Writing to provide students with activities targeted to their
abilities and to topics being taught in the classroom. One of the most important features of this application is that each student’s reading ability
is monitored using auto-generated cloze items that students answer while reading, and writing ability is monitored using a wide variety of
prompts and paragraphs that require editing by students. The auto-scoring features in EdSphere provide each student with immediate
feedback about his or her performance in each area (e.g., time spent reading and writing, amount of words read and written, and percent
correct). Each student’s performance is used to immediately update the estimate of his or her ability. Students can watch their ability grow
over time with the reports that are included in every student’s digital portfolio. Educators can be confident about the precision and utility of
each student’s measure of ability, and they avoid sacrificing more instructional time for testing.

The objective of this research was to ascertain whether student growth in reading in response to exposure to EdSphere could be determined
from an external progress-monitoring measure. Two alternate methodologies are applied to longitudinal data from a panel of students who
encountered EdSphere in the fall of seventh grade to detect evidence that EdSphere usage is reflected in the reading achievement scores.
Exposure is operationalized in two ways: (a) through a time-varying dosage variable (i.e., cumulative reading encounters using EdSphere
determined at each occasion of measurement); and, (b) through a time-invariant dosage variable (i.e., total cumulative reading encounters
using EdSphere).