Reading Ways: Profile-Driven Reading Plans for Older Students

Overview

This project connects my research on adolescent literacy, academic vocabulary, disciplinary reading, motivation, and assessment-to-instruction translation with the applied product work of Reading Ways. The central problem is practical and researchable: secondary schools often know which students are below benchmark, but they need clearer guidance about what each student should practice next, how that support should connect to real coursework, and how teachers, students, families, and administrators can coordinate around a usable plan.

The Reading Ways work develops a profile-to-plan approach for grades 6-12. It uses multidomain reading data to generate strengths-based learner profiles, connect those profiles to strategy toolkits, support student goal setting, and make reading plans visible across intervention, content-area instruction, family communication, and MTSS routines.

Research connection

This project grows directly out of my research interests in how older students read across disciplines, how vocabulary, morphology, syntax, inference, and text integration interact, and how assessment results can be translated into instructional decisions without reducing students to single scores or deficit labels.

The work treats reading profiles as instructional hypotheses, not diagnoses. That distinction matters: the goal is to help educators identify a useful next step while preserving separate information about overall reading risk, MTSS intensity, and the supports a student may need across settings.

Why this matters

Many secondary reading systems are organized around benchmark scores, placement decisions, or intervention programs. Those tools are useful, but they often leave teachers and families with the same question: after the score, what should this student do next in science, history, mathematics, English language arts, career pathways, and other real reading contexts?

Reading Ways addresses that assessment-to-action gap. The project focuses on adolescent learners whose needs may include academic language, disciplinary vocabulary, sentence comprehension, morphology, fluency with complex words, inference, evidence use, motivation, and self-regulated strategy use.

Current R&D

• Developing student-centered reading profiles that combine multidomain reading data with strengths-based explanations.
• Mapping profiles to practical strategy toolkits for use in literacy labs, interventions, and content-area classrooms.
• Designing student goal-setting and feedback routines that support agency, motivation, and strategy use.
• Creating teacher, family, and administrator views that make reading plans clearer and easier to coordinate.
• Studying whether profile-to-plan information is understandable, useful, and feasible within existing school routines.

My role

My role is to connect the product design to reading science and implementation research. I lead work on profile-to-plan logic, adolescent literacy content, strategy alignment, interpretation of assessment data, and the research design needed to evaluate feasibility, usability, and later efficacy.

The project also reflects a broader research-practice commitment: building tools with schools, not just for schools, and testing whether data displays, student-facing explanations, and family communication actually help people make better instructional decisions.

Guiding questions

• How can multidomain reading data be converted into actionable profiles without overclaiming what the data can show?
• What kinds of profile explanations help older students understand their reading strengths and next steps without reinforcing fixed labels?
• How can reading plans support disciplinary literacy rather than pulling students away from content learning?
• What information do teachers, families, and administrators need for reading plans to become instructionally useful rather than compliance documents?
• How can profile-aware technology and, eventually, guarded AI supports remain explainable, privacy-conscious, and grounded in human review?

Reading Ways

Reading Ways is the applied platform and research-practice partner for this work. Learn more at www.readingways.org.