Research is imperative when developing any type of product — and perhaps even more so when developing for such crucial fields as education and language learning. That’s why LoomVue has relied on research-driven data to understand our target audience and validate our product’s implementation in classroom settings.
While LoomVue can help any language learners, our development has always been primarily focused on supporting Spanish-speaking English Language Learners in 6th through 12th grade. Based on national data, the majority of these students scored below the basic level on standardized tests in all subject areas. This is largely due to their limited academic vocabulary and difficulty reading English texts—issues that LoomVue directly addresses with its in-context translations and vocabulary practice features.
Over the past three years, LoomVue has partnered with the third-party organization WestEd to gain insights into the benefits and challenges of LoomVue in K-12 educational contexts. Over the course of usability, feasibility, and implementation studies, WestEd gathered feedback from more than five teachers and over 50 middle-school English Language Learners. Their reports identified several key findings that are valuable to the future outlook of LoomVue.
In these studies, students described LoomVue as “easy to use,” and teachers reported that “students were learning and correctly using the new words verbally in the classroom.”
![A quotation from an English Language Teacher in the Feasibility Study: “After [students] went through the word practice, they were able to actually define those words for me and use them in context.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*saazC3X13A36B91rhLRoBQ.png)
The role of student choice and accountability were also highlighted in these studies, demonstrating that students enjoyed seeing their own progress and being able to save their own words to practice.
Using LoomVue also helped students to understand more about the relationship between their native language and English, thus incorporating metalanguage strategy to develop English fluency more quickly.
![A quotation from an English Language Teacher in the Feasibility Study: “My lower-level students really got use out of [the language help features], because they were able to see the cognates that were formed from those words and that was extremely helpful for them.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*xeer3PAErnTBtOofS9uMxg.png)
For these reasons, WestEd concluded that “the potential for increased vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension…represents a powerful opportunity to positively influence the trajectory for this underrepresented minority population.”
These pilot findings of the LoomVue product are heartening to see, and we appreciate this testament to the hard work and care that our team and, most importantly, these teachers have put into supporting our nation’s multilingual learners.
