Student Experience Using Coach

Micro-interventions

During practice with Maya, students receive personalized coaching: the right intervention at the right time. These are called micro-interventions.

A micro-intervention is a tutoring technique or exercise. Each intervention is designed to build a particular reading skill (decoding, phonics, vocabulary, and so on). Coach employs over 60 types of micro-interventions that help students improve their reading skills.

Coach helps students at three different levels during reading sessions:

  • Word level: when a student is stuck on a particular word

  • Phrase level: when a student is struggling and has misread words in a sentence

  • Story level: when Coach helps students build comprehension and understanding

This video shows Maya in action.

Video example of a student working with Maya

Timing of micro-interventions

During practice sessions, Maya constantly adjusts both the kinds of interventions she provides and the timing before intervening. The aim is to minimize student frustration and maximize motivation. Maya adjusts her feedback based on the type and frequency of student errors. In general, she follows the best practice of allowing 3+ seconds for “productive struggle”. The mean time before she intervenes is approximately 6 seconds.

Types of micro-interventions

The table below shows micro-intervention categories, definitions, and explanations. You can find detailed information and examples in the Micro-intervention Guide.

Table 1. Micro-Intervention Categories, Definitions, and Explanations

Category Definition How Coach Helps
Phonological Awareness The ability to recognize and manipulate​ the spoken sounds in sentences and individual words.​ Coach’s collection of words is based on a​ mapping of every word to the 44 distinct phonemes recognized by the International​ Phonetic Alphabet.
Decoding What we do when we use the letters in a​ word to determine what the word says.​ Coach utilizes a range of interventions to enable​ appropriate instruction and progression from​ simple to more complex words, syllable types,​ and multisyllable words.​
Sight recognition When a child begins to recognize words​ by sight, meaning they no longer have to​ work to decode the word whenever they​ come across it.​ Coach’s collection of sight words comes from the Dolch® Sight Words list, the most commonly​ used set of sight words.​
Vocabulary Refers to words we need to know to​ communicate with others.​ Coach understands over 30,000 words in​ the English language to support students’​ vocabulary development.
Comprehension The ability to extract meaning from what you read; considered the most important measure of reading performance. Coach uses research-based technology to measure, define, and report each student’s learning progression in order to ensure that advanced skills are not introduced prior to acquisition of prerequisite skills.

Accents and dialects

The speech recognition technology that powers Coach can understand a variety of accents and dialects. The technology draws on a speech recognition library that was specifically built using students rather than adults. The ability to detect dialects and accents is built into the library.

Because the technology is driven by AI using machine learning, the more students use Coach the more the system learns how to detect variances in student speech. While the Coach product is a new offering for NWEA, the technology that powers it has been in use for many years. In that time, the system has worked with thousands of English- and Spanish-speaking students with a broad range of origins and language proficiencies, and its accuracy will only continue to improve over time.