Teacher-founded. Texas-built. Classroom-tested for over a decade.
Brittaney McKay started where most educators start: in front of students, figuring out what actually works. She taught Reading and Language Arts across elementary through high school in Texas public schools, then stepped into district curriculum administration — giving her a view of the system from both sides of the classroom door.
Across all of those grade levels and districts, she kept noticing the same thing: even when students could read the words and understand the content, they often struggled to answer the question correctly — because they didn’t have a system to think through the question, locate the text evidence to support their answer, and explain why the other choices were wrong. They were being taught what to think about. What they needed was to be shown how to think through these questions — a clear, repeatable process they could sit down to any test with and know exactly where to start.
That is where the PROVE strategy comes from. It was built in real classrooms and refined every step around what students actually do when they sit down to a question — where they guess, where they get stuck, and what finally makes their thinking click. The framework — Preview, Read, Omit, Verify, Explain — isn’t theoretical. It was built one test question at a time, and it does what strong teachers are already doing in their classrooms — it just makes the process concrete enough to teach, see, and repeat.
After years of teachers across Texas asking for her materials and strategy systems, Brittaney launched In Between the Lattes, LLC to make them available at scale. The name is a nod to the reality of teacher life — the work that happens between the coffee and the chaos. The mission is simple: empower Texas RLA teachers with TEKS-aligned, assessment-focused resources and strategies that drive measurable student success.
PROVE didn’t begin as theory — it began in classrooms. But every step lines up with decades of established learning science. PROVE wasn’t derived from these studies; it independently arrived at what they describe.
A test question puts a heavy load on a student’s attention. PROVE gives them a single, predictable process, so that attention goes toward reasoning instead of figuring out where to start — the core idea behind cognitive load theory (Sweller). And because each step is written down, PROVE turns invisible mental moves into something a student can see and a teacher can respond to — the same principle behind Harvard Project Zero’s work on making thinking visible. The same five steps work two ways — toggle to see how.
Read the questions first and build a PAT list — Pay Attention To — so you know the job before you ever touch the passage.
Preview the question to spot the target skill — a comma, a fragment, a better transition — so you know what kind of fix you’re hunting for.
Research Specific goals direct attention… away from goal-irrelevant activities
(Locke & Latham, 2002); setting a purpose first measurably changes where readers look on the page (Rothkopf & Billington, 1979).
Read with purpose and annotate — “read for a job, not for pleasure” — marking only what connects to your PAT list.
Read the flagged sentence and the lines around it. Errors hide in the context, not just the highlighted spot.
Research Skilled readers are constructively responsive
— adjusting as they read to build meaning (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995) — and teaching that active monitoring raises comprehension (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).
Label each choice before you pick — R for ridiculous, D for distractor — so you slow down instead of grabbing whatever “sounds right.”
Same move on the answer choices: mark the ridiculous ones and the close-but-wrong distractors before you commit.
Research Structured elimination is core test-wiseness
— using a question’s format to earn a higher score (Millman, Bishop & Ebel, 1965) — and studies find it doesn’t compromise a test’s validity.
Find the exact sentence or phrase that proves your answer. Put your finger on it — if you can’t, you may be defending the wrong choice.
Plug it back in. Drop the change into the sentence and read it. “Nope, didn’t work — didn’t prove it.”
Research This is close reading — the standards ask readers to cite specific textual evidence
to support their conclusions, turning a hunch into something checkable.
Research In revision, the hard part isn’t fixing an error but detecting it (Hacker, Plumb & Butterfield, 1994); familiarity makes us read what we expect (Daneman & Stainton, 1993), so re-reading the repaired sentence catches what skimming misses.
Say why in your own words — the link between your evidence and your answer, and why the others fall apart.
Name the rule. Why is this the fix? “Comma splice,” “fragment,” “subject–verb” — proving and disproving each choice.
Research Explaining your reasoning is the self-explanation effect
— the habit that separates strong learners from weak ones (Chi et al., 1989) — and writing it down makes thinking visible enough to coach (Ritchhart, Church & Morrison, 2011).
PROVE it! coaches the strategy, never the answer. Its nudges are about the PROVE process, delivered through three modes — Coach, Assist, and Independent — that gradually release support as students grow more confident.
Crucially, during a test PROVE it! never tells a student a question is wrong. Students aren’t tipped off mid-assessment to change an answer, so a score still reflects what the student actually knows.
That is the difference between a tool that quietly inflates scores and one that produces formative data a district can trust. It mirrors what research on formative assessment and feedback (Black & Wiliam; Hattie) has long found: feedback raises achievement when it builds the next attempt’s thinking — not when it simply flags right or wrong in the moment.
Where PROVE is used consistently, scores rise. In one documented case, a teacher reached 100% STAAR passing with on-level and support classes — not advanced ones. And those gains held up on the in-person STAAR, not just remote benchmarks, which answers a common worry: that strong online scores might reflect outside help rather than real learning.
That distinction points to the bigger problem PROVE it! is built for. A growing body of research finds that reading on a screen tends to pull readers toward faster, shallower processing than print — the very habit a timed online test punishes. PROVE it! carries the deliberate, visible thinking students practice on paper onto the screen, where the test actually happens.
In Between the Lattes began as one teacher’s answer to that need and grew — through teacher communities, conference sessions, and a 12,000-member Facebook group — into one of the most trusted independent RLA resources in Texas. PROVE it!™ is the next chapter: taking a strategy that already works and giving teachers data they can actually act on.
A reading test doesn’t only measure whether students can read — it measures whether they can think through a question under time pressure, on a screen, against choices built to mislead. PROVE it!™ gives every student the same deliberate process, makes their thinking visible, and hands teachers data that explains why a question was missed — not just which one. Better thinking for students; better information for the people teaching them.