Community reviews for ReadWorks

I really like the product. I feel the students get tired of reading informational text and have learned to mix it up. I like that students are able to read non fiction and this tool gives them valuable practice for the state testing. I like that this product allows my students to use analytical thinking when answering comprehension questions about the passages.

I think it is a great tool for teachers who are in schools with low tech. For those who do have the tech Read Works can also be read and worked on from a computer as well. I like it more for their informational texts. Their fiction texts are more Juvenal than I like, but for everything else it is solid stuff.

Overall, I see this as a great remediation or skill builder tool to be used either whole class (for introduction of a skill) or small group in a station rotation group in a blended learning classroom. I think some of our ELL or SPED teachers might also find this useful because they can pull texts based on their students' individual needs and assign to their students.

I have often suggested this resource to my teaching friends as an excellent resource to support our standards based instruction in reading. I like that I can search for articles by grade level, lexile level, content, skills and strategies, text-sets, genre, etc. I find the online component to be engaging for my students. They enjoy having choice in the articles they choose to read and respond to. I do like the student results page and that I can quickly see how students performed on the comprehension questions. Grading the written questions isn't cumbersome because I can now see all students answers to the same question at once, and can easily assign a score to their response. The grading of online assignments is very teacher friendly!

The only downfall is that my students are not as excited to use the program as I am. I think it's a really solid program without all the bells and whistles. I like it for this reason. Not every computer program needs to be a game for the student to learn. In addition, I think this is great to help prepare them for year end testing (that isn't in game form either).

This program is so helpful for teaching literacy and reading! They keep adding new things as well, including being able to have students complete their comprehension and submit it online, which I haven't tried yet. The search feature works great as well. I have absolutely no complaints.

I like how you can find content on all reading levels.

Overall I would give Readworks a 4/5. There are some things that I really like and some that I don't. For example, I really like how easy it is to find and assign content for my students. It is also quite simple to differentiate based on student needs. I LOVE the grading interface as it allows me to quickly move through grading the writing portion of my student's work quite quickly, and I can assign partial points if their response warrants it. As for what I don't like so much, I would say it's not really "fun" for the students. Honestly they don't look forward to Readworks assignments the same way they do for other tech tools we use in our classroom. Also, like others have said, it would be great to be able to customize the questions and/or assign more or less questions for each article.

I like that you can explain the tool and then use the tool hands on to see how well students perform when they are reading. This could help clear up more broad topics that children are not understanding and practice is huge for this app. Without practice children do not gain the knowledge they need to comprehend what they are reading.

I'm continually impressed with the variety of passages. Since I started using ReadWorks they have added additional passages for older students in grades 9-12 as well as added a wealth of readings for science and social studies topics. I wish there was a way to access more of the readings digitally to avoid printing, however, the ability to supplement class readings with ReadWorks makes it a great tool for producing running records or supplementing passages for struggling readers.