ELA Assignments

ELA Assignments gives teachers a dedicated set of tools for building ELA content, bringing together reading-level data, difficulty ratings, and guided student revision with version control, so teachers can match assignments to each student's level and see how their writing improves over time

Year
2026

Project
Beacon by K12 Tutoring

ELA Assignments

Extending assignments and data points into a subject where there's no single right answer

Role: Product Owner & Designer (assignment creation) · Co-Designer (student writing experience)

Context

Beacon's assignment tools were originally built for math, where every problem has one expected answer. Extending them to ELA meant rethinking that assumption at every layer: the language teachers see when building an assignment, the data they use to choose content, and the way students revise open-ended writing.

The problem

Math can check a response against a single correct answer, but ELA can't. A strong response is a quality band, not a match, so teachers need different signals, like reading difficulty and cognitive demand, to choose material that fits a student's reading level, not just their grade. On the student side, writing improves through revision, not a single submission, which we designed the flow around.

Process

I owned the assignment-creation redesign end to end: reframing course-card language for ELA, adding DOK (Depth of Knowledge) and Lexile metadata to every applicable skill and passage, and building filtering so teachers can match content to a student's reading level independent of grade. I co-designed the student-facing writing experience, including the reading passage panel, the guided revision flow, and the scaffolding levels teachers use to adjust task difficulty per student.

What I prototyped

  • ELA-specific course card language: question and exemplary answer in place of expected answer

  • DOK (Depth of Knowledge) rating and tooltip on every skill

  • Lexile level on every reading passage

  • Filtering by skill, DOK, and Lexile to match content across reading levels and grades

  • A reading passage panel that unpins, resizes text, and reads aloud with word highlighting

  • A guided writing revision flow with a document editor, multiple saved drafts, and version history with restore

  • A revision checklist with concrete, skill-specific corrections (e.g., subject-verb agreement)

  • Independent, partial, and full scaffold variants so teachers can level a task per student