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Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)

A bridge between the lab, community, and classroom

Jason D. Yeatman, PhD; jyeatman@Stanford.edu

Associate Professor

Graduate School of Education and Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine

https://ROAR.Stanford.edu/

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ROAR is...

Kid-friendly, efficient, and automated

Assess an entire district/classroom in just a few minutes

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ROAR is...

Kid-friendly, efficient, and automated

Assess an entire district/classroom in just a few minutes

Developed entirely through research-practice partnerships

We work with educators and families

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https://roar.stanford.edu/partnerships/

Our vision is to inspire a virtuous cycle between research and practice. Rather than a one-way street from the lab to society, we embed ourselves in schools and work collaboratively with school district partners to build solutions that are grounded in real world problems.

Unlike any other assessment tool, our mission is to create open-source source technology that other scientists can contribute to, make it open-access and freely available to schools, and to prioritize transpacrency rather than proprietary technology at every step

Through this model, ROAR has already scaled to have collaborations with over 40 schools around the country representing our local community as well as urban, suburban and rural schools across 10 states and independent schools that focus on learning differences. We currently have more than 10 inquiries a month from interested partners.

We are applying for Learning Tools funding to scale to meet these demands while upholding our open-source mission

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https://roar.stanford.edu/partnerships/

Mission: Scientific Transparency

https://roar.stanford.edu/technical/

Research Practice Partnerships: ~200 schools, across 23 states, and 5 countries.

Goal: Serve 1,000,000 students through research practice partnership model.

https://roar.stanford.edu/technical/intro-norms.html

Our vision is to inspire a virtuous cycle between research and practice. Rather than a one-way street from the lab to society, we embed ourselves in schools and work collaboratively with school district partners to build solutions that are grounded in real world problems.

Unlike any other assessment tool, our mission is to create open-source source technology that other scientists can contribute to, make it open-access and freely available to schools, and to prioritize transpacrency rather than proprietary technology at every step

Through this model, ROAR has already scaled to have collaborations with over 40 schools around the country representing our local community as well as urban, suburban and rural schools across 10 states and independent schools that focus on learning differences. We currently have more than 10 inquiries a month from interested partners.

We are applying for Learning Tools funding to scale to meet these demands while upholding our open-source mission

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Grounded in cognitive neuroscience, rigorously validated in the lab and the school

Validation 1: A Hypothesis Individually-administered Woodcock Johnson (ages 7-18)

https://roar.stanford.edu/technical/

Yeatman et al. 2021; Fig. 1

Validation 3: Representative Sample

>600 students across diverse school districts around the US (grades K-12)

Gijbels et al. 2024; Ma et al. 2025

https://roar.stanford.edu/technical/concurrent-validity-swr .html

Validation 2: Young students and tech Individually-administered Woodcock Johnson (ages 6-7)

Yeatman et al. 2021; Fig. 4

ROAR is grounded in over a decade of cognitive neuroscience research and has been, and continues to be, validated in the lab and the school.

In a first validation study conducted early in the pandemic children were individually administered the WJ right before the first shelter in place order and then completed the ROAR unmonitored at home. The correlation between these measures was exceptional: r=0.91

Next we ran a validation study with a new version specifically designed for 1^st graders. Once again, we found an exceptional correlation between unmonitored performance on ROAR versus individually administered WJ: r=0.97

Finally, we ran a validation in the “real world” where ROAR was rolled out simultaneously in 18 first grade classrooms and compared to a 45 minute long individually administered assessment that was standard of practice in the schools. ROAR achieved a classification accuracy above 0.9 in predicting children who were flagged for reading difficulties

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Optimized to be reliable, efficient, fun, and engaging

https://roar.stanford.edu/technical/

Test-retest reliability optimized based on Item Response Theory

Yeatman et al. 2021; Fig. 3

Meet fun characters on your journey!

https://roar.stanford.edu/#demo

Ma et al. in prep

Reliability

Number of trials (assessment time)

Adaptive order (n=239)

Random order (n=250)

N=489; Grades 1-12

0.9

Ma et al. 2025; Fig. 7

40% Efficiency gain with a new Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) algorithm

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https://roar.stanford.edu/for-educators/

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https://roar.stanford.edu/for-educators/

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Thank you for helping us realize the goal of building deeper, systemic relationships between research and practice to support the diversity of learners in CA.

https://roar.stanford.edu/