With little meaningful context gathered from text, students grow to doubt the usefulness of reading. It has become increasingly clear that a curriculum gap has left students without appropriate materials to break the cycle of failure. It was this lack of appropriate intervention materials that led researchers at Peabody College of Vanderbilt to develop the Peabody Literacy Program. The Peabody Literacy Program is based on a unique combination of learning theory and pedagogical principles that capitalizes on the power of integrated media technology. Based upon several years of empirical research conducted at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, this program mediates instruction in word recognition, decoding, and spelling as well as the comprehension of text passages.
Instruction is centered around contemporary topics that are presented on a video anchor.
The program tracks individual student progress and adjusts the instruction accordingly. The three components to the program are represented by a lab metaphor where the student can visit the Word Lab, Reading Lab, or Spelling Lab. Following is a description of each of these components. The theoretical and instructional underpinning of the Reading Lab involves the use of video as a context for instruction. Research has shown that effective readers and listeners construct mental models that contain information about the situations and scenes that a story describes.