Read Live v2.0.6: Release Notes

Released November 2017

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What's New in This Release

Read Live 2.0.6 is a maintenance release that will help improve performance. This release changes some Read Naturally Live reports.

Reports:  What has changed?

Time Spent: 

We have removed “time spent in story” data from these reports: 

• Students Yearly Progress – removed “Hours per level” column
• Student Level Summary – removed “Time Spent (minutes)” column
• Story Details – removed “Time spent”

Why? 

Unfortunately, tracking the time students spend in each story is much more complicated than one would expect.  We were previously able to track the time spent in a story, but tracking this information contributed to performance issues we experienced earlier in the 2017-2018 school year.  

The 2.0.6 release includes our last installment of fixes to address our earlier performance issues.  But a side effect of those performance improvements is that we cannot always accurately track the time a student spends in a story (for example, if the student closes the browser or browser tab without first logging out). Since the time spent cannot be relied upon, it makes more sense to remove it from reports than to continue reporting a questionable value that could lead to poor educational decisions.

What can I use instead?

Even without the "time spent in story," you can get a sense of progress by looking at how many stories a student finishes in a week. In the Level Summary report, look at the dates that a student has finished stories, and see how many stories the student has completed in each week. Based on how many days per week the student works in Read Naturally and length of the class sessions, you can estimate how long students have worked. Use the rule of thumb that students should finish a story in 30–60 minutes. You can use this range to estimate how many stories you expect a student to finish in a week. For example, if a student works in 30-minute sessions four days a week, you would expect the student to finish two to four stories in a week.  Or, on the Students At-a-Glance Report, you can compare the number of stories completed by each student to see if the number of completed stories is about the same, or if a student or students might have completed fewer stories than the rest of the group.

Practices to Reach Goal:

We also removed “Practices to Reach Goal” from the Level Summary and Story Details reports (for both the story and the phonics word list).  

Why?

We have found that this data is not very useful in Read Naturally Live, because most students tend to "magically" reach their goal on the first try.  Once the pressure of “meeting the goal” has been lifted, students settle down and practice until they can read like they speak.  Unfortunately, this means “practices to reach goal” almost always equals 1, which means it is not very useful for analyzing student progress.

What can I use instead?

We recommend using the Students At-a-Glance report as your “go-to” report for tracking student progress.  Here are some articles in our Knowledgebase to get you started:

• Read Naturally Live: Evaluating student progress
• Read Naturally Live: Interpreting actionable data on Students At-a-Glance report