Selected Projects

Reading Skills Assessment

The Client

Lexia Learning Systems is a leading developer of research-based programs that help children and adults learn to read. They also develop tools that assess reading skills in fine-grained detail. These programs allow teachers to teach more effectively by focusing on areas of weakness.

Our Role

Our work with Lexia focused on improving their reading assessment tools. We refined and improved the initial version of their Comprehensive Reading Test, then worked on the development a new version.

The project consisted of an experimental research-based iterative process in which we alternated between developing requirements, implementing them, testing the resulting product, then refining the requirements, etc.

Technical Details

While the application's user interface was extremely simple, its underlying logic implemented intelligent branching that made decisions similar to those made by a human expert testing a child.

The application worked in conjunction with a database that stored results for multiple Lexia products. It was created using the Macromedia (now Adobe) Director authoring tool. The database was implemented using the Valentina DB Xtra.