After participating in a pilot trial of the new EarlyBird game-based early literacy assessment, schools and districts across the United States have chosen to adopt EarlyBird for the 2021-22 school year. Developed and scientifically validated at Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with faculty at the Florida Center for Reading Research, EarlyBird brings together all the relevant predictors of reading in one easy-to-administer assessment, and provides teachers with customized action plans and resources for each student.

During the 2020-21 school year, schools and districts from Maine to California tested EarlyBird with approximately 2,000 children. Maine School Administrative District No. 11 (MSAD #11), for example, began piloting EarlyBird in one elementary school in March, then expanded to a second school in May. This fall, it will implement EarlyBird in all kindergarten classrooms district-wide.

“As soon as we began using EarlyBird, we realized it had a lot of power in terms of the experience it offers students and the actionable data it provides to classroom teachers,” said Angela Hardy, director of curriculum and instruction for MSAD #11. “This data not only helps teachers respond to the needs of the students in front of them, it also helps them think about how they might change their practices or scope and sequence in years to come.”

EarlyBird helps educators identify and support children at risk for dyslexia and other reading difficulties — even before they learn to read. The cloud-based technology platform includes a game-based app that provides comprehensive, validated student testing, and a web-based dashboard that points teachers to easy-to-understand data and evidence-based resources for individuals or groups of students. With data from just minutes of self-administered game play, educators can predict which children will struggle with reading and intervene in the window when intervention is most effective.

“EarlyBird is targeted to those areas that are the number one predictors of reading success. Other universal screeners address these areas to an extent, but none do it as thoroughly as EarlyBird,” said Karen Collin, district instructional coach for literacy in MSAD #11. “EarlyBird is also one of the most developmentally appropriate in terms of the way it’s presented to students. Even students who struggle with attention are highly engaged.”

For information about EarlyBird, visit https://earlybirdeducation.com/.