Reading is one of life’s most important skills. Research shows that students who can read proficiently by 4th grade are 4x more likely to graduate high school and have 33% higher lifetime earnings. However, students are spending less and less time reading, which has been further exacerbated by COVID, and there are not enough hours in the day for educators to provide every student with the personalized support needed to become better readers.
For assessment, the unfortunate choices historically have been between manually assessing and working with students individually (which is a time-consuming process), and technology that is incapable of effectively listening and understanding children when they read aloud. The result is painful – two-thirds of fourth graders in the US are not proficient readers.
Amira Learning’s solution was built to provide interactive tutoring to every child and help each student become a motivated and masterful reader. Amira saves teachers more than 90 hours across the school year by automating Oral Reading Fluency assessment, Running Records, and Dyslexia Screening. In addition, every time a student and Amira read together, Amira generates insightful diagnostic reports that empower teachers and parents. Amira is the culmination of 20+ years of AI and reading science research at leading universities. Several rigorous RCT studies, such as this study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, proved that students who were using Amira progressed at the rate that would’ve happened if we gave them individual human tutors.
We are excited to welcome Mark Angel, CEO and Co-Founder of Amira Learning, to discuss his journey at Amira Learning and the future of AI in Education.
Jenny: Mark, Amira Learning’s ‘Amira & the StoryCraft’ app was just named as one of TIME’s 100 Best Inventions of 2021 - Congratulations! I want to talk more about that but before we do, can you tell us more about why you started Amira Learning in the first place? What problem were you trying to solve?
Mark: Based on my previous experience in the education sector, I’ve had a bird’s eye view on the early literacy problem and what I saw was alarming. Every single year, kids were reading less. In addition, we saw more research around the assessment process that indicated that we were systematically failing to help children achieve fluency by third grade. As a result, we realized we needed to find a new kind of solution that will help students as well as educators and change the equation around the K-3 classroom. Out of that observed need, Amira was born.
Jenny: From your perspective, what makes ‘Amira & the StoryCraft’ one of the three TIME Magazine’s best inventions in Education in 2021?
Mark: I guess it starts with the world we’re living in today – what we’ve seen is that parents and teachers are searching for answers, given the pandemic and the challenges of helping kids learn outside of the conventional classroom. Amira & the StoryCraft is filling an incredible void that’s emerged around how students can be productive when they don’t have the structure and guidance that comes from being in a typical classroom environment. We’re operating in a new world that’s focused on helping kids learn at home by extending learnings from the classroom.
But I also think that Amira is one of the top inventions because we are seeing a confluence of innovations and breakthroughs in AI and reading science. On one hand, we all know that AI and speech recognition have arrived, and we’re able to do things with software that we couldn’t do just a few years ago. Maybe a little less well known is the fact that neuroscience and the science of reading has given us a tremendous number of new insights into how the human brain needs to work to enable a 6- to 7-year-old kid to become a fluent reader.
Therefore, the combination of these two significant innovations coming together allowed us to build Amira where we couldn’t have been able to, even just three years ago.
Jenny: Amira has only been in the market for a few short years, and we’ve already seen incredible successes. Paint a picture for us - what is the impact we’d achieve if we could put Amira in the hands of every child and teacher across the US?
Mark: We’re all about outcomes and impact. What we’ve seen in the research is that there’s been one kind of approach that’s proven to work and it’s one-to-one intense tutoring i.e., high dosage tutoring. However, there are all kinds of reasons why high dosage tutoring has been close to impossible. One is the shortage of qualified tutors, two is the cost, and three is finding a way for this modality to fit into most classrooms. As a result, the scaling and repeatability issues have made it very difficult to give every student a personal tutor.
In research conducted by leading universities, Amira demonstrated the ability to help children grow as much as providing each child with their own certified human tutor. If you take one-on-one tutoring as the gold standard, Amira is right up there.
Another way to understand the impact is to think about it statistically, and Amira essentially creates about 2x the rate of growth in reading ability than what you’d get with a standard tutoring protocol. What that means is if a student is one year behind at the end of the school year, by working with Amira for 30 minutes a day, the student would have caught up to his or her grade level.
Jenny: More broadly, given you have more than 30 years of experience in EdTech and are regarded as a thought leader in the realm of artificial intelligence and NLP, what does this recognition by TIME’s mean for AI in Education at large? What excites you most about the future of AI in Education?
Mark: Whenever you’re trying to bring new technology into the world, you’re overcoming a lot of concerns and challenges. Good concerns such as ‘is this going to work?’. As a result, validations such as the ones we just received from TIME’s are super important to convince the decision makers that really matter - people who run school districts, teachers in classrooms, parents at home. These validations give them the confidence to entrust Amira with some time with their children and students.
In terms of the future of AI in education, what we’re seeing is that people are understanding that the time for edtech is now. Teachers and parents have become more comfortable with using edtech in their day-to-day existence. It is no longer a question of “whether” to use edtech but “what” edtech is really going to have an impact. This is where I think AI is going to shine. We’ve talked for years about the need to personalize and meet kids where they are – none of these ideals and aspirations are going to be met without smarter technology. I truly believe AI is the next generation of technology that we need to fulfill the promise of edtech.
Jenny: What advice do you have for founders and entrepreneurs entering the AI in Education space? Any lessons learned that you’d be willing to share?
Mark: I hope vendors will not be tempted to corrupt the idea of AI. I’ve been in the industry for a long time and have become guarded and concerned about the faddishness that often accompanies waves of innovation. Oftentimes, we take a powerful idea, and we cheapen it and lessen it in the interest of jumping on the bandwagon too quickly. There’s enormous risk of that with AI. A big hope for me is that we’ll all be responsible about what’s AI and what isn’t. This gets to some of the learnings we had at Amira.
From our perspective, something is AI when in fact, the capability of the software is driven by machine learning, and not by IF THEN statements. What we’ve learned is once we get into the world of machine learning, what counts is the fidelity that drives those models. It has been a much harder, and much more difficult journey than we’ve ever imagined – to understand how to curate and manage Amira’s machine learning model. The first question we get in every conversation is how Amira handles dialects and accents. The way Amira handles it is to be trained on different dialects and different accents across a broad and representative group of students. Anybody who is serious about doing real AI needs to assume it will be quite costly and time consuming to get the model right.
Jenny: Finally, what is your grand vision for Amira Learning? Three to five years from now, what would need to be true for you to know that Amira is having a positive impact on reading and literacy in the US and around the world?
Mark: My family came to the US from Mexico and we struggled to adapt to a new culture and a new language. However, I was incredibly fortunate to find reading very early in life and my constant companion was a book by my side. What I saw as I progressed in my career was that so many kids who come from opportunity deficient backgrounds fail to find reading early, creating an incredibly negative impact on their life. It was scary to realize that for so many children’s third grade failure is their destiny from which they’ll likely never recover from. Therefore, I and everyone on the Amira team wake up every morning with a burning desire to solve the literacy crisis we’re facing today and make a big difference. Our vision for Amira is that it becomes a game changer around the literacy process, not just for children, but also for parents, teachers, and adult language learners here in the US and around the world. The incredible opportunity and value that we can unlock by ensuring all kids are set up for success by being literate is massive.
