Microsoft today made Reading Coach, its AI-powered tool that provides students with personalized reading practice, available at no cost to anyone with a Microsoft account.
As of this morning, Reading Coach is available on the web in preview — a Windows app is available. And soon (late spring), Reading Coach will integrate with learning management systems like Canva, Microsoft says.
“It is well known that reading is fundamental to a student’s academic success. studies show that fluent readers are four times more likely to graduate from high school and land better jobs,” Microsoft writes in a blog post. “With the latest AI technology, we have the opportunity to provide students with personalized, engaging and transformative reading experiences.”
Reading Coach is based on Reading Progress, an add-on for the education-focused version of Microsoft Teams, Teams for Education, designed to help teachers encourage reading fluency in their students. Inspired by the success of Reading Progress (obviously), Microsoft launched Reading Coach in 2022 as part of Teams for Education and Immersive Reader, the company’s cross-platform support service for language and reading comprehension.
Image Credits: Microsoft
Reading Coach works by having students identify words they struggle with most and presenting them with tools to support independent, personalized practice. Based on a teacher’s preferences, available tools may include text-to-speech, hyphenation, and picture dictionaries.
After the student has practiced in Reading Coach, teachers can view their work, including the words the student practiced, how many attempts they made, and what tools they used. Teachers can also share this information with students if they wish.
Recently, Reading Coach received a new version in the form of a “choose your own story” feature, powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which allows students to use artificial intelligence to create their own narrative adventure .
Similar to the AI-generated story tool on the Amazon Echo Show, Reading Coach “choose your own story” has students choose a character, setting, and reading level and creates content based on those choices and the student’s most challenging words. (Microsoft says story content is moderated and filtered for things like “quality, safety, and age appropriateness.”) Reading Coach provides pronunciation feedback by listening to the learner read the story and awards badges that unlock new characters and scenes as they go.
Students who choose not to create their own story can choose from curated passages in ReadWorks, a reading comprehension resource library.
“Reading Coach intrinsically motivates students to continue to advance their skills in a variety of ways,” Microsoft continues. “By using artificial intelligence in an effective, safe and responsible way, we believe that personalized learning at scale is possible.”
Microsoft’s rosy view of artificial intelligence for teaching reading comprehension is not shared by all educators, it’s important to note. Experts say there is no foolproof tool on the market to measure comprehension, which includes assessing what students know and the strength of their vocabulary, as well as whether they can sound out and pronounce words. Students can inadvertently affect assessments by pressing the wrong button. Or they may become bored with a task presented by a tool and become disengaged, leading to a low score.
All that being said, teachers don’t think tools like Reading Coach can wound. In a recent EdWeek research center overview44% of educators said they believe adaptive technology does a better job of accurately assessing students’ reading level than non-adaptive software or pen-and-paper methods.
