Reading supports for practice: what a teacher can switch on

What a reading barrier does to practice

When decoding costs a student most of their effort, a science or math question stops measuring what you meant it to. They may understand osmosis perfectly and still miss the item because the stem was long and the answer choices were similar. You end up with a mastery number that reflects reading load, not understanding. The aim of reading supports is to lower that load so the practice tells you something true about the skill.

The Reading support bundle

On the student's supports page, ticking Reading support switches on five things together:

• Read aloud. Lessons, questions, answer choices and feedback are read in a synthetic voice.
• Word highlighting. Each word lights up as it is read, so the eyes and ears stay together.
• An easier-to-read font. You choose Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible.
• Extra letter and line spacing.
• Answer by tapping. Every practice answer is a tap on a choice, so there is no typing or spelling in the way.

The panel labels this bundle with a note about what teachers often choose it for. Treat that as a hint about how people use it. It is not a recommendation, and you can switch any of these on for any student, with or without a label. Each switch can be changed on its own after you start from the bundle.

Extras you can add one at a time

• Colour overlay, a soft tint in cream, blue, green, rose or yellow.
• Large text, a size up across the student's screens.
• Slower reading voice.
• No timers and gentler feedback, because a student who reads slowly often gets penalised by a clock.

Try it like an experiment

What the evidence does and does not say

Be modest here. Research on special fonts and on coloured overlays is thin and mixed, so these are preferences to test with your student, not proven fixes. Hearing text while following it is a long-standing support, but it does not teach a student to read, and it does not replace explicit instruction in reading. If a student is struggling with decoding, they need teaching and, where appropriate, an evaluation through your school. ClassSense is a way to keep content accessible while that happens.

Reading load is partly your design

Settings only go so far when the source is dense. If the stems in a generated set run long, trim them before students see them, and keep answer choices short and clearly different. A reading support can make a long sentence easier to follow, but a shorter sentence is easier still. Planning for the range of readers in your room from the start is the idea behind differentiated instruction.

Honest limits

• Read-aloud covers text that came through extraction. Diagrams, pictures and equations that are images are not read.
• The voice is synthetic and can mispronounce unusual words. It can fall back to the device voice if the natural one cannot load.
• Other languages have not been tested.
• Your own plan, the student's IEP or 504 plan, and your school's process are what decide accommodations. These settings do not change test conditions outside the app.

Pair them with the usual classroom moves: shorter stems, pre-taught vocabulary, and a chance to answer aloud. The page on all the read-aloud and support settings has the full list, and scaffolding covers how to withdraw support gradually.

Common questions