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iReady

This is an online program for K-8 students that provides adaptive assessments and personalized instruction in reading and mathematics. It helps teachers determine a student's needs, create a custom learning plan, and monitor their progress.

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Item Response Theory (IRT) is the foundation upon which the i-Ready program is built. IRT is a contemporary psychometric approach that makes evaluations more accurate and effective. IRT examines the connection between a student's general ability level and how well they do on a particular task. This is the basis that enables i-Ready to modify the exam in real time, presenting each student with questions that are "just right" in terms of difficulty. Because the test is continuously focusing on the student's actual ability level, a student may answer 50% of the questions correctly and 50% incorrectly.

i-Ready is designed to do the following:

1. Assess Student Needs: i-Ready is designed to identify a student's individual strengths and weaknesses in reading and mathematics. It accomplishes this through an adaptive diagnostic assessment that, using IRT, adjusts the difficulty of its questions based on a student's responses, pinpointing their exact skill level.

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2. Personalize Learning: The program uses the data from the diagnostic to create a custom, personalized learning path for each student. It provides interactive, online lessons that target the specific skills where a student needs the most help, allowing them to learn at their pace.

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3. Track and Inform Progress: i-Ready is built to provide teachers with real-time data on student progress. This information helps teachers understand how a student is growing over time, allowing them to make informed decisions about their classroom instruction and provide targeted support to each learner.

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i-Ready uses principles of behaviorism, particularly the concept of reinforcement. The program's instructional lessons often include positive feedback and rewards for correct answers or completed tasks. This reinforcement is designed to encourage students to continue engaging with the material. Furthermore, the diagnostic assessment provides a clear, measurable outcome (the student's skill level) that can be used to track progress over time, which aligns with behaviorism's focus on observable behaviors and quantifiable results. Behaviorist roots are also evident in the program's emphasis on repetition and practice to acquire particular skills.

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The cognitive learning theory, which emphasizes internal mental processes, is the foundation of i-Ready. The diagnostic assessment, in particular, is designed to understand a student's cognitive structures—what they know, how they think, and where there are gaps in their understanding. The adaptive nature of the test is constantly probing a student's mental model of a subject. Additionally, the personalized instruction then provides lessons that are meant to fill those gaps and help students reorganize their knowledge. The program's use of interactive, multi-modal lessons (e.g., animations, audio explanations) is designed to help learners process and store information more effectively in their long-term memory.

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iReady has elements that align with the constructivism theory, especially in how it empowers the learner. The personalized lessons allow students to learn at their pace and in a sequence that is unique to them. This supports the constructivist idea that learners actively build their own knowledge. The program also provides data that helps teachers facilitate learning in a constructivist way. For example, a teacher can use the i-Ready data to create small groups of students who are working on the same concept, allowing for peer collaboration and social interaction—an essential component of constructivism. In this way, iReady acts as a tool that supports a teacher's ability to create a constructivist learning environment.