Rank assessment scores and select students to participate in Fast ForWord. Install the Fast ForWord products. Host a Parent Night to explain grant information and product components and solicit volunteer coaches. Recruit high school, senior citizen, and civic community volunteer coaches. Provide training for coaches. Enroll appropriate students. Students begin using the Fast ForWord products; Evaluate students’ progress using daily MySciLEARN reports. Students finish using the Fast ForWord products; Assess students using appropriate test. Evaluate the product and its effectiveness. Re-align curriculum to new level of students’ reading abilities. Hold community meeting to inform parents and community members about the outcomes. Disseminate product information and results to other interested educators in the district and state. Parent/Community Information Meeting; Parent/Community conferences with teachers bi-weekly during Fast ForWord activity; Parent/Community access to library books; Parents/Community Members work with the Fast ForWord products (at the discretion of the district) to improve their own reading/literacy skills; Parents/Community Members serve as school volunteers; Parents/Community Members train as Scientific Learning coaches; Parents/Community Members serve on Advisory Councils; Parents review MySciLEARN reports and practice phoneme pairs and sounds with the student at home. Evaluation Grant applications will generally ask for your plan to monitor the progress of your students and evaluate the success of your project. The following text describes Scientific Learning’s powerful MySciLEARN reports for monitoring student progress, Scientific Learning’s assessment tool – Reading Progress Indicator – and other suggestions for evaluating student progress, and information about and suggestions for Fast ForWord project evaluations. MySciLEARN reports are online data analysis and reporting tools that enable educators to monitor individual, classroom, school, or district performance of students working with the Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant programs. Staff get clear, action-oriented information showing student progress over time, in specific reading and cognitive skill areas. The data in these reports are one of the reasons why the Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant learning acceleration
Talking, including pronunciation, participation in conversation, vocabulary, spontaneity, and ability to stay on topic; , including recollection of details and event sequence, ability to understand complex sentences, and confidence when reading aloud; Listening and understanding, including response time to questions, ability to follow the flow of conversation, and humor comprehension; Academic achievement, including sounding out of new words and spelling as well as attention span, writing, and math; Memory, including better retention and recall of phone numbers, event sequences, and details. Numerous randomized comparison trial studies have been conducted by schools and show the effectiveness of the Fast ForWord products. A selection of these research studies, and brief descriptions, follow. Study / Reference Research Design Participants Results , (2006) Randomized Controlled Trial 149 fifth and sixth graders from a rural elementary school (62 Fast ForWord; 87 comparison On average, the Fast ForWord students at made gains in reading skills on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, gaining nearly a year in comprehension skills in just four months. Lakshminarayanan K. and Tallal P. (2007) Randomized Controlled Trial 43 college students age 18-25. 20 control, 23 intervention. Students who used a Fast ForWord product to develop skills needed to identify FM sweeps showed significant improvements in their speech discrimination thresholds (particularly /ba/-/da/ discrimination) as compared to a control group. , (2005), 9(8) Randomized Controlled Trial 50 3rd graders at a rural elementary school (25 Fast ForWord; 25 comparison) Fast ForWord results- average improvement on sight word and decoding portions of TOWRE test were significantly higher than the comparison group. , (2006) Randomized Controlled Trial 48 Kindergarten students attending an elementary school: 25 used Fast ForWord to Reading Readiness and 23 were the comparison group On average, both the experimental and comparison groups improved significantly in reading ability as measured by the DIBELS, WJ III, CELF-3, and TOOL. A MANOVA of the Letter-Word Identification subtest of the WJ III revealed that students who used Fast ForWord significantly out performed the comparison group. Miller S, et al. (1999) Randomized Controlled Trial 452 academically at-risk K-3rd graders (288 Fast ForWord; 164 controls) Fast ForWord students demonstrated a statistically greater gain than comparison group students in auditory comprehension and phonemic awareness (TACL & PAT tests).