Reader profile and school marks

A short survey and a place to record report-card marks.

The reader profile records a little about each child, so that progress inside Zen Reader can be set against something outside it. Every question is optional.

The survey

Their birthday, the school year they are in and when their school year starts, and how much of the language they meet outside Zen Reader — spoken at home, spoken elsewhere, read for pleasure, and in what they watch.

It is no longer one language: Which language is this profile for? and Add another language let a child who is learning more than one keep them apart, each with its own course level.

There is also an optional out-of-school tuition table — hours a week, individual or group, per language — purely so that progress is read in context.

Composition

Two choices for Composition practice. They matter only to a family that has Composition, which is a preview not yet in every family's menu.

• Written in — the language this child writes compositions in. It decides which titles they are offered and whether the length is counted in characters or in words. It is not the language the app is shown in, and it starts on Chinese; only languages there are titles for are offered.
• Show the planning boxes as — The Chinese term and an explanation (the default), The Chinese term only, or An explanation only. The term is the one a teacher uses, with its pinyin — 开头 kāi tóu. It changes the boxes on the screen only; the plan printed on the writing paper uses the app's own wording. A piece written in any language other than Chinese always shows the explanation.

The school year above matters here too: it chooses which titles are offered, how long the piece should be, and which planning boxes appear. With no school year set, a child is offered the Primary 3 titles.

School marks

School Chinese marks records the mark from each report card — the month, the language, the mark and what it was out of, the school year and the course level. Adding the last report card gives the graph a starting point to measure from.

Filling it in

Readers fill in their own; a parent picks a child first and sees whose profile they are editing. An adult learning alongside their child can have a profile of their own too, and practise and track progress the same way.

Before Save works you have to tick the line confirming you understand the answers are saved privately for your family. If Save looks greyed out, that box is why.

Ask me later puts the whole thing off for a month. No thanks — adults only — declines it for good; the survey is still there in Settings if you change your mind.

Checking our marking

(Family Manager or Parent — never the child) One switch per child, off unless you turn it on: Keep [name]'s recordings to check our marking. Zen Reader works exactly the same either way.

When your child reads aloud, Zen Reader turns their voice into words and marks what it hears. Sometimes it hears the word they were supposed to say instead of what they actually said, so a mistake gets marked correct. We can estimate how often that happens using synthetic voices, but a synthetic voice does not hesitate, self-correct or mumble the way a real child does. The only way to measure it properly is on real recordings of real children.

• Turn it on and we keep that child's recordings and use them to check our marking against what they really said, and to improve it. Nothing else changes — not what your child sees, not their scores, not their reports.
• Leave it off and Zen Reader behaves exactly as it does now. Recordings are still saved to your family's own library as always; we simply do not use them for this.

You can change your mind at any time. Turning it off removes that child's recordings from the set we check against, and tells you how many were removed. Their recordings stay in your family's library either way — this only affects what we are allowed to learn from.

The same question, in the same words, is on the website at zenreader.co/reader-profile, so it can be answered from a browser.

Privacy

This is personal information about a child. It is stored in your family's account under the same rules as everything else, and is never attached to app-usage data.