For Back-to-School, Savvas Announces New AI-Enabled Scoring Engine That Makes Grading Easier for Teachers and Gives Students Feedback to Improve Their Writing Skills

PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY — September 9, 2024 — For back to school this year, Savvas Learning Company is excited to announce new and enhanced learning solutions and classroom tools designed to make teachers’ jobs easier and improve student outcomes, including the launch of its new AI-enabled scoring engine that provides teachers visibility into the reasoning behind the score as well as the ability to edit the score while also giving students immediate feedback to improve their writing skills.

After acquiring Whooo’s Reading and its AI-powered technology last year, Savvas developed its own proprietary AI-driven capabilities that are being used in the development of an array of cutting-edge tools to support the teaching and learning experience. This includes the new scoring engine for use with its core literacy programs, myView Literacy and myPerspectives ELA, as well as its secondary multilingual learning and intervention programs, iLitELL and iLit45.

In addition to integrating AI-enabled technology in its award-winning literacy products, Savvas is introducing a new phenomena-driven K-5 science curriculum, a new student-centered K-8 math solution, and new editions of its popular core literacy programs. Savvas is also providing a comprehensive solution for students’ post-high school success to meet the growing need for college- and career-readiness pathways. Building upon its acquisition earlier this year of Outlier and its recent acquisition of Pointful Education, Savvas will now offer educators a robust catalog of online dual-enrollment and career and technical education (CTE) offerings.

“Savvas has long been a leader in providing the most innovative K-12 learning solutions powered by the most advanced technologies. We are taking that same approach with artificial intelligence, which when used responsibly with a clear pedagogical purpose and guardrails that protect student data and privacy, has the power to revolutionize the teaching and learning experience like we’ve never seen before,” said Bethlam Forsa, CEO of Savvas Learning Company. “We are excited to introduce our new AI-enabled scoring engine and look forward to further leveraging this technology to develop even more powerful AI-driven tools that deliver greater personalized learning for students and enhanced support for educators.”

New AI-Enabled Scoring Engine

The new AI-enabled essay scorer not only provides feedback and scoring for prompts (or questions) built into the curriculum but it also enables teachers to create their own essay questions. Scoring is provided across six aspects of writing: ideas, organization, conventions, sentence fluency, word choice, and voice. Savvas developed a state-of-the-art machine learning model that is able to determine if the student’s written responses actually address the questions. To help improve their writing skills before they submit an essay, students can easily access a summary report that includes helpful feedback to their responses to both the curriculum-embedded and teacher-generated prompts.

Later this fall, Savvas will begin piloting the next version of its AI scoring engine that will feature sentence-level feedback in which students will get immediate feedback in the body of their essay, helping them with sentence structure, transitions, word choices, and syntax, among other things. In order to ensure it provides accurate scoring across 25 key skills areas, the AI powering the model was trained by an expert team of writing teachers who have collectively reviewed and scored authentic student essays more than 50,000 times.

New and Updated Core Curricula that Engage Students

Savvas Learning Company’s core instructional programs make learning exciting by engaging students with the most interactive, immersive, and personalized content, easily accessible on the Savvas Realize learning management system (LMS), newly redesigned to provide greater ease of use. New and updated programs available for this school year include:

• Experience Math © 2025, a new student-centered K-8 program, engages students through exploration and a hands-on learning approach, encouraging them to be active mathematical thinkers and problem solvers. The blended, easy-to-use three-part instructional design emphasizes student teamwork and collaborative learning while supporting teachers with high-value, in-the-moment professional learning.
• A new integration of Brainingcamp digital math manipulatives for use with Experience Math and the award-winning enVision Mathematics make math learning even more visual and interactive, enabling students to build deep conceptual understanding.
• Experience Science © 2025, a new phenomena-driven K-5 science program, designed in collaboration with teachers, cultivates students’ sense of wonder about the world around them. Supporting teachers with a flexible, blended curriculum that makes it easy to personalize instruction, Experience Science brings science concepts to life through engaging, hands-on experiences where students learn science by doing science.
• myView Literacy © 2025, a proven, comprehensive K-5 program grounded in the Science of Reading, offers in its new edition an increased focus on foundational reading and writing instruction, more skills-based, student-centered practice opportunities, and greater built-in teacher training and support.
• Also new for back to school, Savvas is introducing the Momentum Dyslexia Screener, part of the Savvas Momentum Assessment Suite. The Dyslexia Screener for Grades K-3 is a powerful, user-friendly tool designed to help identify students who may be at risk for dyslexia.
• myPerspectives English Language Arts © 2025, an evidence-based, standards-aligned 6-12 program, features in its new edition powerful, interactive resources that provide students exciting multimedia content and give teachers valuable tools to monitor students’ progress in real-time.

Supplementing core K-8 ELA curriculum with adaptive personalized instruction, SuccessMaker Reading has also been enhanced with new foundational skills content and new morphology content that builds students’ ability to decode and understand multisyllabic words, all aligned with the Science of Reading.

High-Quality, Online Solutions for College and Career Readiness

In today’s fast-paced, digital world, student success after high school is more dependent than ever on their access to college and career training. Savvas is meeting this need with solutions for educators that offer a rich array of high-quality courses that help their middle and high school students explore career pathways and learn skills needed to prepare them for college and the workplace.

• Outlier by Savvas provides online, asynchronous dual-enrollment courses that enable students to earn high school as well as real transferable college credits from the University of Pittsburgh — a top 50 university — without ever having to leave their school building. The portfolio of award-winning, college-level courses offer cinematically produced lectures from top-rated instructors and mastery-based learning. With Outlier, college credit is driven by the student’s overall course grade, not a high-stakes test like an AP exam.
• CTE courses, from the recently announced acquisition of Pointful Education, provide middle and high school students with the academic and technical skills, knowledge, and training to succeed in future careers. Featuring 55 courses developed by industry experts, their engaging instructional design is packed with interactives, videos, projects, language translations, and text-to-speech functionality. These robust CTE courses include subjects such as health science, business, STEM, and IT, and many courses prepare students to earn industry-leading certifications.

“We take pride in developing high-quality K-12 learning solutions that enable educators to give their students a strong foundation in the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the classroom and beyond,” said Forsa. “Now, with our new online dual-enrollment and CTE course offerings, we are making college- and career-readiness programs exciting and accessible for all students, providing them with individualized learning pathways that prepare them for the next stage of their lives.”