Student App – Reading Experience
iLit is a reading program for struggling students who are poor readers, don’t want to try, and believe they will never be good. We have shown, however, that good UI/UX design can motivate and even attract these learners.
The program’s aim is to engage these students with relevant texts that show off high-quality and high-interest graphics. Throughout the reading experience, students are provided with intrinsic and extrinsic rewards such as the library ticker that shows how many words, pages and books the student has read.
Student App – Assignments
Most students don’t like assignments, but they are a necessary part of any school curriculum. We made the experience a little less demanding by showing only one question at a time and including intriguing visuals.
We also templatized the look and feel of assignments so that the cognitive load of each new task was lessened. As the students go through iLit, they come to recognize and become familiar with how the assignments work so they can focus on providing their best response. Templates were also crucial to our internal editorial and development team as they didn’t have to create each assignment from scratch.
Teacher App – Lesson Planner
In a traditional textbook curriculum, Teachers are given lesson plans, overviews, classroom management tips, and what standards are being met within each lesson. We followed that familiar metaphor within the teacher app. Teachers needed an intuitive and recognizable way to preview each week and day, know the goal for the lesson, and how to launch the material.
Teacher App – Visual Support
The teacher has the difficult challenge of keeping distracted students engaged. In creating the curriculum, we collaborated with editorial experts to support the instructional material with unexpectedly funny and delightful images and videos. Our goal was to produce art that is up to the standards that the students see outside the classroom.
Teacher App – Performance
The ultimate goal of iLit is for students to gain two years of reading growth in a single year. In order to do this, Teachers needed a way to track progress to see where each student is weakest and adjust their instruction based on data. This level of detailed data was not possible with traditional paper grade books. We wanted to leverage the ability of technology to be useful for teachers and benefit students.
ClassView Portal
Similar to the teachers, School and District-level administrators need to monitor the progress of students to see if the curriculum is working. The ClassView Portal is a website that provides varying levels of access based on the user’s position. School Administrators see data from their school only, while District Administrators can see the whole district. Our goal was to make the mass of complex student data as simple and clear as possible.
Education Week Ad Campaign
Pearson is a very large company with many educational products, iLit being a small and experimental one. While most products don’t need to advertise, we found that iLit needed a campaign to raise awareness and name recognition. As with most awareness campaigns, a consistent visual style and message was important.
It seems to be working…
iLit’s primary goal is to raise student’s reading level by two grade levels in a single year, and it seems to be working. This is only one example from one school and one students. For more stories and case studies, please visit redefiningliteracy.com.