Innovation Profile 129

Doubling the quality and quantity of learning

A teacher with a class of 30 pupils can only spend 1/30th of her time individually helping each. That is why classroom assistants and parents are asked to listen to children read, helping them with difficult words.

How much help you ask for and get is an indicator of how much you are learning. The change in how much help you ask for is a measure of what you have learnt.

A child who is starting to become an independent reader still needs help but may wish to challenge themselves to read without an adult sitting next to them. But if they meet words they do not understand, a delay in getting help will break the flow experience of reading.

Talking stories overcome this problem. A word that cannot be understood can be heard when the child feels they have struggled long enough to read it. Crick Software also provide talking stories that are bi-lingual, which allow help to be gained by reading or hearing the mother-tongue version of the story. See
http://www.cricksoft.com/uk/ideas/teaching_eal/hounslow.htm for details.

A teacher who has access to tools such as these to aid reading has many ways in which they can increase the value of the education that is taking place. They can focus the available human effort on those pupils that need social encouragement to read, while enabling the more independent readers to have the challenge of reading alone, while still gaining immediate help in their reading. The qualitative improvement in education for both groups might be a doubling of quality. But how should we measure this?

The quantitative improvement is perhaps easier to measure. It may well be possible to give two or three times the number of children a quality learning-to-read experience in class, than can be managed without ICT.

Of course software like this can also be used out of class, so there could perhaps be a doubling or more of the time some children practice reading, while still having immediate help available.

ICT used in this way is causing a major improvement in learning. Teachers and parents recognise this, but the explicit measures to convince education funders and politicians are lacking, un-researched and not made visible.

The Crick Software Company Profile on our web site will give you a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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