The OCLP was first piloted in three Orange County middle school classrooms during the 1994-95 school year. The project has grown to include nearly 4,000 students in grades 4 through 9. Each OCLP classroom is supplied with five computers capable of running the PLL software and all teachers are given more than a week of professional development on the literacy project. The Peabody Learning Lab software, based upon several years of empirical research conducted at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, capitalizes on the power of integrated media technology. The program mediates instruction in word recognition, decoding fluency and spelling as well as the comprehension of text passages.
Instruction is centered around contemporary topics that are presented via a video anchor.
An animated tutor guides the student and provides feedback via a digitized human voice. The program tracks individual student progress and adjusts the instruction accordingly. A comprehensive set of data collected during the first two years of the pilot study included measures of reading achievement, overall school achievement and student behaviors and attitudes. Average vocabulary and reading comprehension subtest scores of the 376 students on the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test improved significantly over the course of the program. School attendance and grade point average also improved.