The Science Behind Amira

Amira is Science in Action

Amira began decades ago, born from research out of Carnegie Mellon University and developed by experts in Science of Reading and AI technology. Amira's ground-breaking AI transforms reading science into classroom-ready assessment, instruction and practice to help students become skilled readers.

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The Intelligence Behind Every Reading Moment

AI Built for How the Brain Learns to Read

Every component of Amira’s architecture reflects decades of research and cognitive science.

The Amira AI is purpose-built and reflects Science of Reading with a range of abilities unique to its proprietary composition:

  • Listen: Amira's advanced speech recognition captures every oral reading moment
  • Decide: Reinforcement learning is what ensures that Amira can guide and scaffold word-reading, fluency and comprehension, providing real-time support and recommending the best next instructional move
  • Dialog: Comprehension model gives Amira the ability to guide and scaffold, real-time support during reading
  • Classify information: Custom models ensure Amira can listen and detect reading errors, fluency and dyslexia risk
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Science Creates Coherence Across the Amira Reading Suite

Amira ISIP Assess™ | Real-Time Assessment That Reads Between the Lines

Amira doesn’t just score reading, it understands it. Built on models of phonological processing, Amira listens to students read aloud and analyzes how the brain is working in real time. 

  • Dynamically adjusts the assessment to reduce fatigue and increase accuracy 
  • Flags early risk indicators and delivers actionable data for instruction 
  • Combines decoding tasks, phonological awareness, and oral fluency

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Amira Instruct™ | Smarter Instruction, Aligned to the Brain’s Learning Pathways

Amira identifies how many exposures each student needs to master a skill, then adjusts instruction accordingly. The result? Time-to-progress is faster and instructional minutes go further.

  • Maps fluency, attention, and working memory to guide pacing and scaffolds
  • Aligns to your curriculum, standards, and instructional calendar
  • Pinpoints the number of exposures each student requires for skill mastery

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Amira Tutor™ | Multisensory Coaching That Builds Skilled Readers

Amira acts like a reading coach beside every student, guiding oral reading, delivering real-time feedback, and developing reading through structured practice.

  • Responds within milliseconds with scaffolded micro-interventions
  • Reinforces decoding, fluency, comprehension, and other contributors to reading success
  • Engages multiple modalities (auditory, visual, motor) to deepen learning

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Science of Reading

Assessment Uncovers a 360° Degree View of the Student Reading Brain

Amira ISIP Assess™ doesn’t just measure progress — it uncovers the why behind student struggles, giving teachers actionable, Science of Reading-grounded data instantly and providing a 360° diagnostic profile of a student’s reading brain, completed in minutes:
Oral Reading Fluency with Miscue Analysis
Captures accuracy, rate, prosody, and error types to reveal decoding vs. language gaps.
Phonological & Phonemic Awareness
Segmenting, blending, and manipulation tasks diagnose foundational skills
Phonics & Word Recognition
Pinpoints grapheme-phoneme correspondences, decoding efficiency, and word recognition issues.
Vocabulary & Morphology
Detects gaps in vocabulary breadth and morphological awareness (prefixes, suffixes, roots).
Listening & Reading Comprehension
Measures literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension, aligned to Simple View of Reading.
Dyslexia Risk Screener
Early-warning indicators validated against gold-standard screeners.
Science of Reading

Science of Reading is Amira’s DNA

Amira was built from neuroscience and three decades of Science of Reading research, making Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the Simple View of Reading, and Duke’s Active View integral to its design. Amira's reports and recommendations are structured around Science of Reading strands, which is why it has so much credibility with literacy leaders.

Amira Tutor™ Provides Instant, 1:1 Interventions

  • Delivers immediate, individualized feedback and micro-interventions as the child reads.
  • Mirrors expert reading specialists by scaffolding phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and comprehension.
  • Provides 90+ SoR-aligned scaffolds (e.g., Elkonin boxes, onset-rime practice, modeled rereading, vocabulary clarification).
  • Engages students with interactive, conversational tutoring that builds confidence and independence.

Continuous Progress Monitoring: Every tutoring session doubles as formative assessment, updating growth trajectories in real time.

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Amira Instruct™ Curriculum-Coherent Teacher Support

  • Generates curriculum-aligned lesson plans and small-group activities within minutes.
  • Aligns every recommendation to district pacing, scope, and state standards, protecting curriculum investments.
  • Creates Individual Reading Improvement Plans (IRIPs) automatically in state-compliant formats.
  • Provides continuous data dashboards from student to district level, supporting MTSS/RTI workflows.

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The Reading Rope

The Reading Rope Report: A Simple View of Complex Data

Amira’s Reading Rope Report transforms complex literacy data into a clear, teacher-ready map of student skill development. Inspired by Dr. Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the report breaks reading mastery into its essential strands—helping educators see not just what students know, but what to teach next and delivers a dynamic, research-aligned visualization of each student’s progress across the strands that matter most:

  • Phonological Awareness
  • Decoding & Word Recognition
  • Oral Reading Fluency
  • Vocabulary & Language Comprehension
  • Reading Comprehension

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The Skill Status Report

Skills Status Report: Spot Trends to Take Action

The Skill Status Report is an important tool within the Amira Reading Suite, designed to help educators track student mastery, differentiate instruction, and make intervention decisions by providing an at-a-glance summary of each student’s performance across foundational reading skills.

Skill-Level Breakdown:

The report displays a grid of literacy subskills (e.g., phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension) and each skill is color-coded based on the student’s current performance and risk level.

Real-Time Updates:

After each benchmark, progress monitoring assessment, or tutoring session, the report is automatically updated. It reflects live data, offering teachers current insights into where students are growing and where they are at risk.

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Science of Reading
at Scale Drives
Real Impact
Amira helps educators bring SoR-aligned instruction to life—with measurable outcomes. Every reading session provides embedded assessment, immediate feedback, and personalized practice.
Faster
Reading growth than other technologies
68%
Students
Supported worldwide
4M+
Extra Weeks
Growth per year
7+
Using Amira has significantly improved the accuracy of our instruction and interventions. The dashboards in Amira give us clear recommendations, eliminating the need to sift through complex reports. We've already seen the impact, with measurable gains in reading growth.
Dr. Brayden Savage
Superintendent, Western Heights Public Schools, OK

Trusted and Recognized by Leading Experts

FAQ

What makes Amira different from other reading technologies?

Amira isn’t your typical edtech reading program. Amira is a learning agent grounded in decades of neuroscience, reading science, and AI. Unlike traditional reading technologies, Amira listens as students read, responds in real time, and dynamically adjusts instruction based on what the student needs. 

How Is Amira Designed Around How the Brain Learns to Read?

Amira is built on decades of brain research into how children learn to read. Amira’s design reflects how neural pathways for decoding, fluency, comprehension, and attention develop over time. Amira listens as students read, then applies models aligned with cognitive neuroscience, activating the regions responsible for phonological processing, orthographic mapping, semantic understanding, and executive function. This allows Amira to deliver instruction and tutoring that mirrors how the brain builds skilled reading.

How is Amira aligned to the Science of Reading?

Amira is built on frameworks like Scarborough’s Reading Rope and Duke’s Active View of Reading. Amira supports explicit, systematic instruction in decoding, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary, aligned with how reading skills develop in the brain.

Can Amira really adjust to each student’s individual learning needs?

Yes. As students read aloud, Amira analyzes real-time behaviors—like miscues, hesitations, and fluency patterns—to deliver micro-interventions personalized to each student’s current cognitive profile.

What kind of research supports Amira’s models?

Amira is based on 30+ years of research from institutions like Carnegie Mellon and validated through studies in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and reading development. Its design reflects how the brain processes language, memory, attention, and meaning-making.

Is Amira developmentally appropriate for all learners?

Amira supports students across reading levels, including early readers, multilingual learners, and those needing intervention. Amira’s feedback and scaffolds are designed to match each learner’s developmental stage and instructional needs.

How does Amira work for students with accents and/or speech impediments?

Amira is designed with inclusivity in mind. Its AI models are trained on a wide array of speech samples, including different regional accents, dialects, and speech characteristics. Amira achieves this by listening for the intended reading skills, not just perfect pronunciation which reduces flags for dialect differences. And rather than flagging students for speech patterns, Amira instead responds to reading miscues that will impact comprehension, decoding, or fluency. Additionally, Amira has been evaluated for performance across dialects, multilingual learnings, and students with speech or language difficulties to ensure every student is supported. 

Note: While Amira can accommodate a variety of speech patterns, it is not a diagnostic tool for speech or language disorders. Its role is to surface reading patterns, not replace SLP services. 

How does Amira use AI responsibly in the classroom?

Amira is intentionally designed to keep teachers at the center of learning. Every design decision reflects a commitment to ethical, transparent, and research-aligned use of AI in education. Amira’s models are trained on children’s speech and reading, ensuring every recommendation aligns with brain-based reading development. 

Amira operates on secure, private infrastructure, never shares student data with public AI platforms, and does not use data to train large language models. All student voice data is de-identified, used only for educational purposes, and remains fully under district control.

For Amira, responsible AI means protecting students, ensuring transparency, and staying grounded in the science of learning.

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