A symphony of letter sounds rang through Lacey George’s class at Westowne Elementary School last week. Kindergartners sounded out each letter of “sap,” “gab” and “gap” before saying the full word out loud. But it wasn’t George helping them decode — it was Amira.

The cartoon avatar stands on the side of their screens with a smile, walking them through an activity that gets them reading out loud. She’s an artificial intelligence program that Baltimore County Public Schools officials say is closing learning gaps and improving literacy at record speed. Amira gives students more one-on-one instruction, helps teachers pinpoint the areas where they’re struggling and shows particular promise among kids whose first language is not English.

Meanwhile, a local nonprofit is sounding the alarm about digital devices in language art classes. Maryland READS, a literacy advocacy group, points to research that suggests screens may do more harm than good among early readers.

But for Baltimore County school officials, its students’ progress outweighs any concerns.

Inside the Catonsville class, a student lay on his stomach across the alphabet rug with his laptop and a pair of white headphones hugging his ears. On his screen was Amira, a woman of color sporting an army green vest, guiding the student as he clicked on red circles revealing the letters “T,” “A” and “G.” The student sounded out each letter before blending them into a word. “Tag!” he yelled, wiggling his feet.

George’s students use Amira in 12-minute chunks, totaling a recommended 30 minutes per week. It’s a tiny portion of their overall reading instruction time, which is 2.5 hours per day for students between kindergarten and third grade.

Last week, the kindergartners were operating the program on their own, but there’s a learning curve at the beginning of the school year. When Amira was first introduced, microphones and headphones didn’t always work, students struggled logging in, and the program didn’t pick up student’s accents, educators said. Kindergartners have since learned how to plug in their passwords, and the program began recognizing their speech patterns.

Now kids are excited to use it. They talk about Amira as if she’s a real person, educators said. They love her dog avatar, Spot, and ask reading specialists if they’re friends with the AI woman.

Even the educators are fans. Reading specialists at Westowne showed school board members a picture of them dressed as Amira and were awarded the Amira National Champions of the Month for November by the Amira Learning company. They say Amira has made students more confident readers, writers and speakers.

Amira is distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s the same company that produces one of Baltimore County’s core language arts programs, Into Reading. It isn’t the only program of its kind out there. According to EdSurge, it’s part of a growing market of AI reading tools like EarlyBird, Bamboo Learning and Imagine Learning.

Amira records each student’s lessons, allowing teachers to go back and listen for areas of struggle. It informs teachers what to focus on for small group instruction — an opportunity for more targeted support. And since Amira allows kids to learn independently, teachers have more time for small groups.

Westowne started using Amira last school year. It’s in alignment with the science of reading, a teaching practice backed by brain science that the Maryland State Department of Education is pushing more school districts to adopt.

The danger of leaning into screens

Maryland READS, which advocates for reading instruction aligned to data and science, is urging caution regarding the use of technology in students’ language arts classrooms.

Executive Director Trish Brennan-Gac said she is alarmed by the growing body of research that shows digital devices may depress focused reading and critical thinking skills. And she wants policymakers to consider the harm done by screens as they debate the right approach to lift language arts proficiency rates overall. Last school year, less than half of the state’s students were proficient in English language arts.

“We need to slow down and take stock of what this research says,” Brennan-Gac said.

One study found that students in fourth and eighth grades who spent more time using computers or other digital devices in their language arts classrooms scored worse on a national standardized test. Students who used digital devices to help train lower-level reading skills struggled the most, according to the 2022 study.

Another study examined whether the historically positive relationship between reading for fun and reading comprehension shifts when the ritual involves a digital device. Researchers found elementary and middle school students struggle to comprehend the text they read for fun on a screen, whereas high school and college students do not.

These outcomes don’t shock Maryanne Wolf, a reading expert who teaches at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. She said people use different parts of their brain when they read print versus when they read a digital text. Reading a printed text requires concentration, whereas digital reading encourages skimming.

Wolf said there’s a good reason to worry, but it’d be foolish to think technology can or should be eliminated from schools entirely.

“It’s not that we’re against the innovative,” she said. “But we can’t innovate without asking what it disrupts.”

Jennifer Craft, Baltimore County’s executive director for literacy and humanities, said she attended a Maryland READS webinar when digital device concerns were discussed.

“We think that there should not be an isolation of any one thing as a predominant way of teaching,” she said.

The case for AI

A Texas school district has had so much success with Amira that it is looking to expand use of the program, said Jenny Olsen, the Elementary English Language Arts coordinator for the Pflugerville Independent School District.

She said the artificial intelligence that powers Amira gives students real-time feedback on pronunciation the same way a teacher would when working with a small group of students reading aloud.

At first, the voice of Amira sounded “like a robot,” Olsen said. But the AI technology evolved, and now, “she sounds like an adult.”

The results in Olsen’s district are clear. Reading comprehension among students who used Amira for 10 minutes a day, three times a week was 30% higher than students who didn’t.

“Kids didn’t learn phonics well during the pandemic,” Olsen said. “Amira cannot supplant the work our teachers do, but she’s helping us fill gaps.”

In Baltimore County, early data show similar promise for the program.

All 110 public elementary schools in Baltimore County use Amira for students in kindergarten through third grade. At Westowne, and 65 other Baltimore County elementary schools, fourth and fifth graders use it, too. It’s dependent on whether test scores show if the older students could use the additional help.

Westowne Elementary students made the largest gains in reading compared to prior years. About 65% of students were proficient in reading by the end of last school year, a 12 percentage point increase since the beginning of that year.

On average, over a third of students with disabilities were proficient in reading, compare to a quarter at the start of 2023-2024. Multilingual learners jumped almost 20 percentage points during the same time frame.

The percentage of students reading at or above grade level improved for kindergarten through third grade, with the biggest improvement in kindergarten, where students made a 26-percentage-point jump. Danielle Gemmell, one of Westowne’s reading specialists, said it’s also helped multilingual learners during the oral portion of their English language tests now that their pronunciation has improved.

“Our students who are implementing Amira and practicing on a regular basis, they are growing at much higher levels than any other intervention and core instruction that we’ve provided in recent years across Team BCPS,” Superintendent Myriam Rogers said at a recent school board meeting where Westowne administrators and staff presented their success with Amira.

Board members were impressed but asked questions about excessive screen time.

Anthony Schultz, one of Westowne’s assistant principals, said screen time at their school is only for instruction, not for play or a reward. And Rogers said she recently spoke to school principals about setting a balance.

“While we don’t want to cut back on Amira … there are other places and spaces where we can pull back on the technology,” she said.

This story has been updated to clarify that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a distributor of Amira. It does not own the company.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.