eBRAVO is an online tutor that explicitly teaches reading strategies used by skilled readers to understand complex texts. Reading instruction occurs as students learn about a science topic that forms part of their secondary curriculum.

eBRAVO is designed for middle and high school students to use in the classroom or at home.

eBRAVO works on Chromebooks, PCs, Macs, or tablets with an up-to-date web browser. It is available at no cost from the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder as part of a U.S. Department of Education grant.

eBRAVO bridges the divide between grade-school, largely narrative reading materials and middle- to upper-grade textbooks. Each feature of the eBRAVO design, structure, and implementation is shaped by a specific goal: to prepare students to comprehend complex, informational texts — in school and in their adult lives. This program revolves around a powerful combination of elements:

• An evidenced-based model of comprehension for informational text
• Specific reading strategies that are supported by the comprehension model
• Taught congruently with knowledge building of ecology content
• Ongoing assessment of students’ comprehension skills and content knowledge with targeted lessons
• Engaging topics and high-quality materials in a teachable program

The comprehension model underlying the eBRAVO curriculum views comprehension as a multi- layered process: Advanced readers use their word knowledge, their language knowledge (how grammatical devices and text structures convey intended meaning), their knowledge about the subject matter, and their general background knowledge in order to build an accurate and coherent understanding of what a text is about.

Emphasizing the crucial role that knowledge plays in comprehension, eBRAVO targets three levels of processing: (1) establishing local level coherence from sentence to sentence; (2) understanding how paragraphs relate to one another and to the overall topic; (3) deepening one’s understanding of the content and embedding it in memory by inferring connections between the content and one’s own knowledge.

The Ecology Reader is designed to address key aspects of the the Common Core State Standards for secondary science and language arts. Comprehension strategies are explicitly explained, modeled, and practiced as students work through a graduated series of twelve increasingly complex, short chapters about ecology. The Ecology Reader adapts to the needs of each student by assessing their comprehension and providing instruction on up to five specific strategies. Parents or teachers can monitor student progress in the eBRAVO dashboard and adapt the curriculum in a way that best meets the needs of his/her student(s).

This joint focus on comprehension and knowledge building combined with an adaptive learning environment is what make the eBRAVO Ecology Reader unique.