Educator with a Practical Use for Sentence Diagramming

Jim Britt is an academic advisor for Sentence Analytics, a company whose sentence diagramming tool is designed to help all students better comprehend what they read – especially English language learners. He spent 40 years as a classroom teacher, bringing a wealth of institutional knowledge to the company.

Part Two of a Two-Part Interview

I asked Jim about the purpose behind sentence diagramming software, and he gave me an unexpected yet very practical answer. “A hundred thousand kids in the state of Texas across all grade levels failed their state test by one or two questions,” Jim said.

“When they fail the test by one or two questions, it’s a fail, and they’ve got to take it again. The districts and the classroom teachers have to use a lot of resources ─ material resources, human resources, financial resources ─ to help these kids catch up. If we can be successful in using the technology, especially early enough in the process, then we feel like we can really benefit everybody up and down the line by not having these large numbers of kids fail. We have the same number of kids pass by three or four questions. And so, we just don’t have this need for all this remedial stuff. We’re hoping that it can have that kind of impact through the chain.”

Helping with high-stakes tests is just one of the positive outcomes with Sentence Analytics software. It’s apparent that Jim and his team are making significant progress.

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