Innovative assessment and instructional tools for language, reading, and writing
60-80% of students do not meet grade level expectations in reading comprehension and writing. This poor academic performance is largely due to a lack of focus on language, which is the foundation for academic success. Our innovative assessment and instructional tools are grounded in years of research, showing that educators can effectively address the academic needs of all their students.
Explore our Evidence-Based Tools
Multitiered Language Instruction
Promote the upper strands of the Reading Rope with language comprehension instruction
The Story Champs family of instructional tools employs an explicit, systematic, and cumulative approach that integrates vocabulary, sentence structures, discourse, inferencing, and background knowledge to advance oral and written language.
All Ages
MTSS Literacy Assessment
Monitor language comprehension and word recognition to inform instructional decisions
CUBED-3™ is a suite of innovative and efficient literacy assessments designed to measure all strands the Reading Rope, supporting beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year benchmarking, as well as more frequent progress monitoring.
Preschool-Eighth Grade
Diagnostic Assessment
Accurately identify language disorder and dyslexia while eliminating cultural and linguistic bias
DYMOND™ is a norm-referenced dynamic assessment that identifies language learning and decoding learning disorders with unparalleled efficiency and accuracy. It can also be used as a Tier 1 DLD and dyslexia screener.
Kindergarten-Eighth Grade
Kindergarten Literacy Screener
Identify children with language and decoding intervention needs before they can read
PEARL™ uses dynamic assessment to quickly and accurately screen young children, including those who are culturally and linguistically diverse, for future language and decoding learning difficulties.
PreK-Kindergarten
Training and Implementation Support
Training Options
Explore individual and group training options, delivered by implementation experts.
Webinar Library
Browse through previously recorded webinars on our assessment and instructional tools.
Demonstrations
Take advantage of video demonstrations and tutorials our assessment and instructional tools.
Research Articles
View the peer-reviewed research behind our assessment and instructional tools.
Meet Our Founders
As educators, clinicians, and researchers, Douglas Petersen, PhD, and Trina Spencer, PhD, BCBA, have been researching narrative language for nearly 20 years. They have been published in several top-tier, peer reviewed journals. To view their research, click here.
Douglas Petersen, PhD
Dr. Petersen is a full professor and Maggie & Dick Scarlett Chair in Speech-Language Pathology, Language & Literacy in the department of Communication Disorders at the University of Wyoming. He is a certified speech-language pathologist with several years of clinical and research experience.
Trina Spencer, PhD
Dr. Spencer is the director of Juniper Gardens Children’s Project and full professor at the University of Kansas. She is a school psychologist, special educator, and board certified behavior analyst. Dr. Spencer promotes interdisciplinary collaborations and community-research partnerships.