EPS Learning's SPIRE UP

EEP-EPS Holdings LLC d/b/a EPS Learning

EPS Learning's SPIRE UP

SPIRE UP: From Foundations to Fluency

Bethesda, MD, USA

United States

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

Today’s middle schoolers are struggling more than ever with reading. These students were in their pre-school and early elementary school years when Covid-19 disrupted learning. The consequences of pandemic lockdowns have led to an international crisis – a vast portion of pre-teen and young teen learners are unable to read and comprehend grade-level texts. Without immediate intervention, these students will fall further and further behind their on-level peers. What happened during the pandemic? Typically, during elementary school young learners begin to build critical skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency--the building blocks of reading proficiency. Reading science tells us that these skills require direct instruction, guided practice, and effective reinforcement through meaningful practice. But that kind of individualized instruction was impossible during the pandemic, so students currently in middle-school lack the basic foundational reading skills needed to comprehend their ELA, STEM, Social Science, and related texts. The only way to remediate this problem is through intense, accelerated intervention, which will help middle schoolers gain the skills they missed during their disrupted schooling.

SPIRE Up is a best-in-class hybrid reading solution that is designed to empower teachers to lead literacy instruction for middle school students who missed out on critical English language reading instruction during the pandemic. The program was developed to be delivered by teachers in grades 3-8 who may not have a background in foundational reading instruction, and who have limited classroom time to offer intervention. SPIRE Up leverages technology to facilitate teacher-led instruction and guided practice, administer and report formative progress monitoring assessments, and provide students with independent reading practice that fosters proficiency and self-efficacy. Middle school educators do not have time for intensive reading intervention, and few of them know how to deliver the effective foundational reading instruction that is typically addressed during the grades K-2. SPIRE Up is designed to be implemented with fidelity during the brief time teachers have for intervention, and the program drives the outcomes students need to become proficient, grade-level readers. The program leverages technology to facilitate teacher-led instruction, administer and report on formative progress monitoring assessments and empowers students to practice reading independently.

Current research shows that low socioeconomic status (SES) middle school students are far more likely to be struggling readers than high SES students. These striving readers lack foundational reading skills and are unable to understand the increasingly complex texts of grade 5-8 curricula. Mastery of foundational reading skills (i.e., phonemic awareness and phonics) is necessary for decoding – the ability to translate the written word to speech. Students cannot begin to understand texts until they have crossed the “decoding threshold” – the point where students accurately sound out and recognize words with enough automaticity to make meaning from the text. The low SES learners who are now in middle school missed out on acquiring decoding skills during their early elementary years because they were sequestered in their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Shaul et al. (2024) found “Children from low SES backgrounds exhibited notably lower reading scores after a year of remote learning due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Moreover, the disparity in reading scores between low SES and high SES children nearly doubled in 2020.” SPIRE Up is designed to accelerate learning for striving learners who need support with foundational reading skills.