The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a five-year Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant to a partnership led by the Wyoming Department of Education and the Iowa Reading Research Center (IRRC) at the University of Iowa. The program, named “Project Skyword Literacy: Lifting Decoding and Fluency through Data-Guided Practice,” is designed to improve reading fluency for students in third, fourth and fifth grade who struggle to move beyond basic skills.
The project will scale up school use of WordFlight, an online literacy assessment and intervention tool developed by Iowa-based reading resource company Foundations in Learning. The program is intended for students who have learned phonics but not yet achieved fluent reading, a gap research shows can significantly hinder comprehension and long-term academic success. According to the organization, WordFlight has helped 85 percent of participating struggling readers reach proficiency in foundational reading skills within a school year.
Beyond student access to the tool itself, the grant supports new approaches to monitoring and implementing reading interventions, sponsored by the University of Iowa. The IRRC will oversee on-site assessments, professional development and data collection in participating schools, while the college’s Center for Evaluation and Assessment will conduct evaluations of outcomes and cost-effectiveness across states.
“This grant allows us to provide WordFlight to students who need personalized intervention to support their foundations for reading fluency, while testing and expanding models for educators on the ground to sustainably support high-impact interventions,” Foundations in Learning CEO Allison Zimmermann said in a public statement. “This will allow us to serve more students, especially in rural districts and those with fewer resources.”
Additionally, Seth King, associate professor of special education at the University of Iowa and an IRRC research fellow, said in a public statement that the multistate design will allow researchers to study how evidence-based reading practices perform across different school contexts.
The project aligns with a broader national shift toward data-driven and reading-science-oriented instruction. In recent years in Iowa, state education officials have directed tens of millions of dollars toward evidence-based reading initiatives and made AI reading tutors available to school districts.
