Welcome to the Multitudes Newsletter!

Greetings to our school research partners and friends of UCSF Multitudes! 

This week we are launching our first quarterly newsletter and our new website. We hope these platforms will keep you up to date with our work and progress towards implementation. We welcome your feedback as well as your news items and events that may be relevant to our community of practice. Please check out the "Get Involved" tab on the website, for a few more ways to stay in touch.

We have a lot to celebrate in 2024! In just three years, we have engaged over 10,000 public school children from seventy school sites during the research and development of the Multitudes platform and tool. This tremendous achievement is thanks to all of you. Whether you have been collecting data, coordinating teams, training staff, or sharing your critical feedback as a beta tester, we are so grateful for the enthusiasm, expertise, and care you are bringing to this project.

We hope to see you in the field or in the office soon!

Multitudes Beta Testing Begins!

This academic year, the UCSF Multitudes team entered an exciting phase of research, with the beta-testing of our literacy screening tool. UCSF Multitudes Version 1 (Mv1) is a neuroscience-based digital platform that will help educators identify kindergarten and first graders who may experience reading challenges, and guide educators to instructional next steps.

Mv1 was developed by the UCSF Multitudes team in collaboration with educators and researchers from around the state and our partner institutions. Designed specifically for - and with - the student population of California, our team is building a tool that is scientifically valid, scalable, and culturally and linguistically affirming for our students and communities. As a publicly funded project, the UCSF Multitudes platform will be ready to launch in 2025 and free for all Local Education Agencies in California.

UCSF Multitudes version 1 (Mv1) was first introduced to over 100 educators and administrators across the state last summer. These partners participated in training to administer Mv1 measures and received an orientation to the complete UCSF Multitudes platform, which includes a class dashboard, results reporting, and an intervention library.

Beginning in October, Mv1 users received Multitudes platform logins and have begun assessing their Kindergarten and First Grade students using the first step of the Multitudes assessment. In all, thirty-eight educators representing twenty-one schools and eleven districts from across all four geographic regions (Sacramento, Bay Area, Central Coast, Los Angeles) are engaged in beta testing Mv1 this year.

The UCSF team has already received a wealth of feedback from testers, and we look forward to collecting additional data on user experience with the Mv1 platform, to refine the next version of Multitudes, which will include a Spanish language screener and measures for second graders.

Stay tuned for more updates from UCSF Multitudes in the field during the year!