Elevate: A Useful App for Dyslexic Adults?

As with my review of Lumosity, I will start by declaring an interest of the friendly sort: I use Elevate, and I enjoy it. It is one of the apps I actually open rather than one I downloaded with good intentions and forgot about.

It also interests me more than most apps in this category, and for a specific reason. A good deal of what Elevate asks you to do is not abstract puzzle-solving. It is reading a passage and answering questions about it, choosing precise wording, spotting an error in a sentence, or working out a percentage in your head. Those are functional academic skills, not decorative ones — and that changes the conversation.

What Elevate is

Elevate is a commercial app offering short daily training sessions built around skill areas including reading and comprehension, writing, vocabulary and expression, listening, memory, focus, processing and mathematics. Sessions usually consist of a few timed activities, adapt in difficulty as you go, and are tracked over time.

As before, the company's own material is a fair source for what the app contains. It is not independent evidence that the app improves anyone's thinking, and I have not treated it as such.

What I like about it

• •The content feels useful. Reading a short passage and answering questions about it is a real-world task, not a laboratory abstraction.
• •Sessions are short and finishable. Three or four activities is a manageable commitment on an ordinary weekday.
• •The difficulty adapts. Activities tend to sit just above comfortable, which keeps them worth doing.
• •Feedback is immediate and specific. When you get a vocabulary or editing item wrong, you find out why.
• •It is quietly confidence-building. For an adult who has spent years believing they are "bad at English", getting comprehension and vocabulary items right is not a small thing.

What skills does it draw upon?

Looking at the activity types through an assessor's eyes, the demands appear to fall into two broad groups.

Looking at the activity types through an assessor's eyes, the demands appear to fall into two broad groups.

Functional academic skills

• •Reading comprehension — extracting meaning, holding a passage in mind and answering inferential as well as literal questions.
• •Reading speed — moving through text at pace while still retaining the sense of it.
• •Vocabulary and word meaning — lexical knowledge, which is built through exposure and use.
• •Writing, editing and grammar — noticing errors, choosing precise wording and applying conventions.
• •Mental mathematics — number facts, estimation and calculation under time pressure.

Underlying processing demands

• •Working memory — holding information in mind while doing something with it.
• •Processing speed — responding accurately within a time limit.
• •Sustained attention — staying with a task while the difficulty rises.
• •Listening and auditory recall — taking in spoken information and using it afterwards.

This mix is the interesting part. Practising a functional skill such as vocabulary or editing is a fairly ordinary form of learning, and learning does work. That is quite different from the much bigger claim that a few minutes of daily gaming will raise general cognitive ability.

Why might this be relevant to dyslexia?

Adults come to assessment for all sorts of reasons: a promotion that suddenly involves report writing, a course that involves far more reading than expected, or a long-standing sense that written work costs them more than it costs everyone else. Our page on dyslexia assessments for adults covers what that process involves, and dyslexia at work looks at the workplace side.

Some of those adults show relative weaknesses in areas such as phonological processing, working memory or processing efficiency, and some do not. I want to be as clear here as I was in the Lumosity review: difficulties with memory, processing speed or attention are individual findings, not universal features of dyslexia. Plenty of dyslexic adults have excellent memories and are quick thinkers; their difficulty sits elsewhere.

Where I think Elevate is genuinely interesting is in the ordinary sense that practice helps. Building vocabulary, becoming more familiar with sentence structure, or simply reading more text with attention are reasonable things to do, and they are things people can measurably get better at. That is a modest claim, and a defensible one.

What it does not do is address decoding, spelling accuracy or phonological processing in the structured, cumulative way that specialist literacy teaching does. An adult whose core difficulty is decoding unfamiliar words needs the right teaching, not a quicker vocabulary round.

What it does not do is address decoding, spelling accuracy or phonological processing in the structured, cumulative way that specialist literacy teaching does.

What does the research actually tell us?

Honestly? Less than anyone would like. There is very little independent peer-reviewed research on Elevate specifically, and I am not going to manufacture certainty where none exists.

What we can draw on is the wider literature on cognitive training, which applies to this whole category of app. The key distinctions are the same three I set out in the Lumosity review:

• •You reliably improve at the specific activities you practise.
• •You sometimes improve on closely similar tasks.
• •Broad, lasting transfer into everyday reading, learning and work is where the evidence becomes weak and inconsistent.

Simons and colleagues (2016) reviewed the field extensively and found strong evidence for the first, limited evidence for the second, and little support for the third. Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme (2016) reached comparable conclusions about working memory training specifically, including a lack of transfer to word reading.

There is one nuance worth noting in Elevate's favour, and I offer it as reasoning rather than as proven fact. When an app has you practise reading comprehension or vocabulary, the "trained task" is itself a real-world skill. The transfer problem is smaller because the gap between practice and application is smaller. That is a sensible argument, but it is still an argument — not a study showing that Elevate users read better in daily life.

Limitations

• •Timed activities can be discouraging. Time pressure is precisely where some dyslexic adults feel worst, and a low score can reinforce an old, unhelpful belief.
• •Reading-heavy items assume reading fluency. If decoding is the barrier, an app that presents dense text quickly may be frustrating rather than helpful.
• •Scores are not assessment. App performance tells you nothing diagnostic and should never be used as evidence of, or against, dyslexia.
• •It is a subscription. Worth deciding whether the money would do more good spent on specialist tuition or assistive software.
• •Independent evidence is thin. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does mean claims should stay modest.

My verdict

I like Elevate, and of the apps in this category it is the one I find easiest to justify. The activities are closer to real skills, the sessions are short, and for many adults the experience of getting things right is worth something in itself.

I would treat it as enjoyable practice with a bit of purpose attached, not as an intervention. If a dyslexic adult asked me whether it was worth trying, I would say yes, with the caveats above — and I would add that a text-to-speech tool or a good dictation set-up will usually make a bigger practical difference to a working day than any amount of daily training. Our guide to technology and assistive tools for dyslexia covers those, and there are practical downloads in our free dyslexia guides and resources.

Evidence and further reading

• •Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "Brain-Training" Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.
• •Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of "Far Transfer". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534.
• •Federal Trade Commission (2016). Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges — a useful illustration of how carefully brain-training marketing claims should be read.
• •British Dyslexia Association — assistive technology guidance.
• •GOV.UK — Access to Work, including support with workplace software and equipment.

If reading this has raised questions about your own profile rather than about apps, you are welcome to get in touch for a free 15-minute conversation before deciding anything.