Games and Learning

LightSail boasts more than 80,000 titles and offers teachers real-time assessment of student reading.

The popular K-12 literacy tool LightSail is making the move towards gamification. According to the recent numbers, it’s a popular move, though not one they initially had in mind.

Launched last October, LightSail has made a splash by creating an e-reader platform that allows students to read desired text and embeds assessment tools in those texts that supply teachers with data on student performance in real time.

But when someone described some of the new tools included in the platform as gamification, LightSail’s Chief Academic Officer Jessica Reid Sliwerski recently recalled the “bristling” feeling she experienced.

“Gamification and LightSail?” Sliwerski wrote. “No, no, no… we had designed a pedagogically sound, nutritious literacy tool, steeped in traditional principles, and I didn’t want anyone to think otherwise.”

But by making more information available to students — including more visually striking feedback, increased the number of badges studious readers can earn and a classroom leader board so students know where they rank among their classmates — teachers report some students have turned reading into more of a game.

During a recent LightSail-facilitated webinar, Monique Choyce, a 4-grade teacher in Los Angeles, Calif., highlighted the leader board’s effect on two of her students in particular.

“Reuben and Sergio are very competitive,” Choyce said. “It’s so surprising to me. It’s essentially become a game, a literacy game. And it’s become so cool to watch. I totally love the gamification realm, because it gives [my students] something to connect with, and they already have a frame of reference in terms of games, and they’re applying it to their learning.”

And LightSail is quick to highlight the data components that the gamification features help produce, like in this promotional video:

LightSail Data from LightSail Education on Vimeo.

In terms of LightSail, this happened as students tried to drive up their Lexile measures — an educational metric created by MetaCritics that gives educators an idea how well their students are reading. Students increase or lower their Lexile by defining words or answering multiple-choice short answer questions — all Common Core-aligned and completed as the student progresses through an assigned book.

Some of the features on LightSail’s more gamified student dashboard.

A poll suggests — yes, someone graciously conducted a poll about leader boards —  the majority of e-learning platform users, similar to LightSail, like the idea of leader boards as in-classroom motivational tools, though it’s unclear what the long-term impact these leader boards have on the overall classroom experience.

Still, when it comes to increasing literacy rates, you can’t fault teachers and parents looking for new ways to keep their students’ noses in a book, digital or old-fashioned paper, for any amount of time.

Roughly two-thirds of 4- and 8-graders can’t read or comprehend school texts at a proficient level, with nearly 25-percent of 8-graders struggling below even basic levels.

So what prompted Sliwerski’s attitude change towards toward the role games can have within sound educational pedagogy?

Karen Vaites, LightSail Chief Marketing Officer, believes the answer lies in the data.

“I’ve worked closely with our team as we’ve gone on this journey about gamification,” explained Vaites, who said LightSail may have had its doubts about whether games really had a role to play in the educational process until Sliwerski and her team discovered a trend in their users’ activity.

“The most game-like elements of her own product were some of the most motivating for students,” Vaites said, “and it was that experience that made her say, ’There is something to this gamification thing.’”

The crew behind the literacy startup believes they can sketch a pretty good idea what’s making students read by looking at the activity of their 100,000-plus active users. According to Vaites, actions like annotating within an assignment, the amount of time spent reading, and assigning books that aren’t too high and or too low for a student’s reading level all correlate with increased literacy among students.

“If I had to cut to the chase on this, the most powerful predictor of whether or not a student grows as a reader is reading time,” Vaites said.

“They become more fluent, they pick up more vocabulary, they show signs of comprehension growth and more. But there’s a difference between believing it’s true and actually showing it.”

According to teachers using the product, LightSail’s ability to put that information on a graph and clearly present it to schools has been very valuable. And Vertais said it’s feedback from teachers that will serve as LightSail’s “true north,” in terms of designing and deploying new tools.

“I think we’re a very user-directed company,” she said.

She also added that feedback is what is truly driving many of the gamification additions to the service, saying, “What can we give back to a school? Anywhere that the answer is more game-like features, we will build game-like features all day. We would jump both feet into the water into being a game-over-literacy tool if we showed that was what drove Lexile growth.”

No teacher is going to mistake LightSail for a graphics heavy puzzler on an iPad, but the company has found adding motivators like leaderboards and badges may encourage students to reader longer (although some research has raised questions about whether it’s necessarily better).

However, what’s interesting, from a games and learning perspective, is companies like LightSail are willing to hit the brakes and embrace gamification even after initially keeping games-like features at a distance.