At Ypsilanti Community Schools in Michigan, something remarkable happened last school year – and it happened digitally.
Educators there saw a striking 9-percentage-point increase in reading growth for students in grades 3 to 5, thanks to a simple yet transformational shift: using their standard commercial ELA curriculum in a deeply digital design. This wasn’t a new curriculum. It was the same one they had always used, but restructured to speak the language of Generation Alpha.
This generation – the first raised entirely in a screen-based world – doesn’t just tolerate technology. They expect it. Raised with touchscreens, streaming media, and on-demand information, their learning styles are more visual, exploratory, and collaborative. For them, the static, paper-based model of learning feels foreign and unengaging.
Why The Shift Happened, And Who Made It Happen
The transformation began with a simple but powerful question: What if teachers could take the curriculum they already use – and make it work better for their kids? Ypsilanti Community Schools (YCS) serve a student population where more than 50 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Educators in the district knew they needed something more engaging, more accessible, and more aligned with how students were experiencing the world outside of school.
Carlos Lopez, Director of Curriculum at YCS, had long been exploring innovative ways to increase engagement and performance in the district. Inspired by earlier digital learning collaborations, he reached out to the University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula, a group of researchers and educators focused on creating deeply digital, standards-aligned learning environments.
Together, the teams envisioned a bold experiment: to take a high-quality, print-based commercial ELA curriculum and reconceptualize its structure for the Roadmap Platform – a visual, interactive concept-mapping tool that presents lessons as connected nodes of activities, multimedia, assessments, and collaboration spaces.
What resulted was more than a digital translation—it was a re-architecture of learning around how today’s students think, move, and explore.
Ypsilanti Community Schools (YCS) serve a student population where more than 50 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Educators in the district knew they needed something more engaging, more accessible, and more aligned with how students were experiencing the world outside of school.
Building the Roadmaps: From Vision to Reality
The University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula had already built a library of deeply digital, Open Educational Resource Roadmaps used across Michigan, primarily in low-SES districts. But adapting a commercial curriculum was new territory.
The process began with mapping the existing scope and sequence into visual “Roadmaps,” where each lesson became a navigable journey through reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension activities. Each node could include videos, visuals, audio, and interactive tasks. The goal was to preserve fidelity to the original curriculum while enhancing the experience through digital delivery.
The University of Michigan Center for Digital Curricula team, where the authors lead school-based innovation projects, collaborated with YCS teachers and administrators to ensure alignment, relevance, and usability. Teachers didn’t need to become coders – they just needed to engage with the platform. The new lessons, hosted on the Roadmap Platform, are designed to be intuitive: teachers click, drag, edit, and share lessons with minimal effort. Most reported that it actually saved them time in lesson planning once they got the hang of it.
Still, support mattered. Teachers received targeted professional development focused not just on how to use the Roadmap Platform, but also on understanding the pedagogical shift—how this tool allowed for more student agency, differentiation, and collaboration. Importantly, they weren’t asked to teach a new curriculum; they were invited to teach their familiar content in a more adaptive, student-centered way.
The new lessons, hosted on the Roadmap Platform, are designed to be intuitive: teachers click, drag, edit, and share lessons with minimal effort. Most reported that it actually saved them time in lesson planning once they got the hang of it.
Impact in Practice: What the Data – and Teachers – Revealed
The results were clear. In a study published in the Journal of Interactive Learning Research, researchers compared two groups: one using the traditional format of the ELA curriculum and another using the Roadmap-formatted version. The Roadmap group outperformed their peers by 9 percentage points on the NWEA Conditional Growth Percentile metric—a statistically significant result. And in an underserved district where over 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, that kind of growth matters, a lot.
Teachers echoed the data:
- 72 percent reported higher student engagement
- 65 percent noted significant time savings in planning and prep
- 73 percent believed Roadmaps had directly increased achievement
Importantly, this wasn’t a pilot with extra funding or specially selected classrooms. It was real teachers, in real schools, working with the same curriculum and students, but with a digital format that matched how today’s learners engage.
The study was straightforward. One group of students used the commercial ELA curriculum in its traditional format; another group used the Roadmap-formatted version. Both groups were in the same district. Both used the same base curriculum. The only difference was the delivery.
The result? Students using the deeply digital Roadmaps curricula scored, on average, at the 48th percentile on the NWEA Conditional Growth Percentile metric, compared to the 39th percentile for their peers using the traditional version. A 9-point gain.
Traditional instructional models – linear worksheets, passive listening, teacher-only control – often miss the mark. Roadmap-formatted curriculum doesn’t just digitize content; it reflects how today’s students learn: visually, actively, and autonomously.
Why Generation Alpha Needs This Approach
Generation Alpha is growing up in a screen-first world. Before they can write their names, many are swiping through playlists, calling Alexa, or editing videos on an iPad. These students are attuned to design and highly responsive to interaction.
Traditional instructional models – linear worksheets, passive listening, teacher-only control – often miss the mark. Roadmap-formatted curriculum doesn’t just digitize content; it reflects how today’s students learn: visually, actively, and autonomously. It allows students to navigate lessons at their own pace, click into the resources they need, and respond using text, voice, or video.
It also supports equitable access. In communities where resources are often limited, deeply digital tools like Roadmaps provide structure, flexibility, and personalization that paper can’t match—especially when combined with Open Educational Resources and collaborative support from university partners.
The University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula team of educators converted traditional curriculum into Roadmaps – modular, concept-mapped, interactive pathways through a lesson. The result? Instead of flipping pages, students clicked through nodes replete with a rich mix of text, audio, visuals, simulations, and personalized activities, all housed in a dynamic, student-facing interface.
Ypsilanti’s experience shows that improving student outcomes isn’t always about reinventing the wheel – it’s often about rethinking the spokes. The same curriculum, delivered in a new format, made all the difference.
But Roadmaps aren’t just flashy technology. They embody pedagogical intention:
- Social constructivism via real-time collaboration and shared workspaces
- Multimodal design to reduce cognitive load and improve retention
- Differentiated instruction by enabling teachers to adapt content for each student’s pace and style
The platform also offered teacher-facing views for planning and embedded tools like AI voice support and video response features to make learning accessible and personalized.
Guidance for Other Districts
Curriculum leaders considering a similar shift can start by reimagining – not replacing – your existing resources. Collaborate with a digital learning partner like the University of Michigan Center for Digital Curricula to reconceptualize curriculum for interactive delivery. Provide hands-on professional development that emphasizes pedagogy, not just tech tools. And above all, prioritize the student experience: focus on engagement, accessibility, and agency.
The Takeaway: Why Delivery Design Matters
Ypsilanti’s experience shows that improving student outcomes isn’t always about reinventing the wheel – it’s often about rethinking the spokes. The same curriculum, delivered in a new format, made all the difference.
The implication here isn’t that we need new content. It’s that we need to deliver existing content in a way that aligns with how today’s students learn. Roadmaps do that by treating curriculum as interactive, not inert. Visual, not linear. Personal, not passive.
More broadly, this case from Ypsilanti suggests that the digital transformation of K-12 isn’t about adding devices to the classroom—it’s about reimagining pedagogy for a generation that already lives in digital spaces.
As more districts grapple with post-pandemic engagement challenges, digital fatigue, and widening learning gaps, the Roadmap model offers a blueprint: use what’s available, redesign delivery, and re-center learning around today’s students, not the ones schools used to teach.
For districts looking to close gaps, Roadmap-formatted, deeply digital curricula present a promising, equity-driven path forward. As we continue to seek ways to improve reading outcomes nationwide, Ypsilanti has just lit the way. Now it’s time to bring that light to classrooms across the country.
The authors lead school-based innovation projects at the University of Michigan’s Center for Digital Curricula.
Anne Tapp Jaksa
Professor, College of Education, Saginaw Valley State University
Cathleen Norris
Associate Dean for Research, College of Information, the University of North Texas
Elliot Soloway
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, School of Education, University of Michigan