Context

Magpie Literacy unlocks the great reader in every child.

In line with its mission, Magpie Literacy is developing research-based PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage students' unique characteristics to help them master the foundational reading skills they need to become strong, confident readers.

Magpie Literacy commissioned our data scientists and engineers to build a text-to-skills mapper to annotate any classroom text with the foundational skills necessary to read it. Such a system enables Magpie to generate just-in-time practice material for readers based on the skills they lack to become autonomous readers.

Solution

In collaboration with linguistic and pedagogical experts, we developed a full-stack AI-based solution that allows the Magpie team to automatically annotate any classroom text with foundational reading skills. The system can accurately annotate each word in a text with a subset of skills from 200+ choices. Foundational skills are represented as grapheme/phoneme pairs, e.g. ph /f/. These domain expert annotations, which can be a tedious and error-prone process if manually done, are required to generate accurate and tailored just-in-time learning material.

Illustration of the output of the text-to-skills mapper on the word “photos”

How it works: expert-in-the-loop

1. The instructor uploads a text that the students need to read

2. The text-to-skills mapper annotates the text with the foundational skills that learners need to read and engage

3. The instructor can review and correct skills as needed

4. The text-to-skill algorithm continuously improves based on human feedback

Impact

Magpie Literacy can automatically annotate any classroom text with 90% accuracy in seconds. The expert-in-the-loop design ensures maximal accuracy of the final output and enables continuous learning from the algorithm.

The system's output will be part of a more global Learning Engine that will match students’ reading skills with the texts they have to read in the classroom. It brings Magpie Literacy one step closer to equipping every child with the skills they need to become great readers.

Testimonial

"As a startup with limited resources, it was critical for Magpie to have highly talented Toboggan Labs teammates join our work and help us identify what is feasible for the students we serve. Because of this partnership, we are meaningfully closer to giving students the right intervention at the right moment for them to become lifelong readers."

--Leo Bialis-White, Chief Strategy Officer

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