Fast ForWord^® Language Series Has Greatest Impact of Any Intervention Listed by NCRTI

• September 22, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

Educators and families who are looking for appropriate learning interventions for students often turn to The Instructional Intervention Tools Chart from the National Center on Response to Intervention (NCRTI).  Now, the Fast ForWord® Language series has been added to the chart, with the NCRTI evaluations of research on the series supporting the claim that the products have high-quality studies, demonstrating their effectiveness when used for Response to Intervention (RtI).

The effectiveness of the Fast ForWord Language series is evident from the “effect size” found by the NCRTI. Effect size is a statistical way to measure the magnitude of the effect of an intervention.  Of the three studies on the Fast ForWord Language series that have been evaluated by the NCRTI, one showed a medium effect size and the other two showed a large effect size. In fact, two of the three Scientific Learning studies were ranked as having the highest scores in effect size, showing that the Fast ForWord Language Series had the greatest impact and the largest positive effect of any intervention listed by the NCRTI.  These evaluations of research on the Fast ForWord Language series validate the quality of the studies behind the products, demonstrating their effectiveness when used for RtI.

The impact identified in the NCRTI evaluations holds up in real-world implementations, as well.  For example, one district used the Fast ForWord program as its only intervention for kindergarteners during the 2009-2010 school year, to see what kind of difference the program could make when used as the sole intervention for participating students.  Westerly Public Schools in southern Rhode Island identified kindergarten students who scored at the deficient or very deficient levels in letter sound fluency and letter naming fluency on the AIMSweb benchmark, and placed these students into the Fast ForWord program, with no other interventions.

After using the Fast ForWord program, test scores for the participating students rose substantially, and many were able to move off of the personal literacy plans they had been placed on as struggling elementary students.  Because only the Fast ForWord program was used, the district was able to determine that these effects were due to the students’ participation in the program.  And because the students didn’t need as many interventions, the district also saved money.

The NCRTI is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The center partners with researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Kansas to build the capacity of states to assist districts in implementing proven models for RTI.

Visit http://rti4success.org/instructionTools to see Scientific Learning’s listings on the NCRTI’s “Instructional Intervention Tools Chart.”

Watch the video on “effect size” and the NCRTI evaluation of the Fast ForWord Language series products.

Related Reading:

Results from a “Gold Standard Study” Show Significant Student Gains in Language and Literacy Skills

Intensive Intervention Tier 3: What Leads to the Need?

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Categories: Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic problems, improving reading skills, intervention, learning to read, reading intervention, response to intervention tier iii, rti tier iii, student growth, technology in education, video

My Son Announced He Was Dropping Out of High School: Mary’s Story

• September 15, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

This post is the fourth in a series aimed at sharing the success stories, both personal and professional, that Scientific Learning employees witness every day.

Mary’s Story:

I was hired at Scientific Learning in 2007 to educate people about the products as an Account Manager in the Midwest.  At the same time that I got the phone call to find out if I had interest in talking to Scientific Learning, our ninth grade son announced to us that he was not going to high school and he was going to drop out.  It took my breath away. Both his father and I have been educators for many years and we both hold advanced degrees. 

I said, “Todd, you have to go to high school,” and he said, “But I don’t want to go.” I said, “But you have to,” and he asked, “Well, what would happen if I didn’t go?” I said, “It’s the law, Todd.” Then he said, “I can’t read.  I can’t keep up with it.  You guys have done everything for me that is possible but I can’t read.  I can’t read at grade level.”

I called my son’s teacher (we convinced him to go to school) and I said, “Here’s the carrot.  My son doesn’t have to do any homework until he finishes this product.  This is his homework at night.”  And every night he came home and did Fast ForWord. 

And what he did is committed to doing 90 minutes a day and he was done is less than 4 weeks, and he did the post test and when I looked up the score my son had gone from seventh grade, one month reading level to tenth grade, two months reading level. He was a year above grade level and for the very first time in his life he said, “I love to read.”

All I can say is thank you to all the scientists that did all the work to bring this product to not only my son but to the parents and kids out there in America who need it so desperately.

Related Reading:

Language Skills Increase 1.8 Years After 30 Days Using Fast ForWord

Implementation Fidelity: Maximizing Your Fast ForWord® or Reading Assistant™ Investment

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, below grade level, employee stories, high school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores, reading comprehension, self-esteem, struggling readers, student growth, success stories, technology in education, video

Improving Auditory Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

• September 8, 2011 by Barbara Calhoun, Ph.D

Summary:  A recent study by Nicole Russo of Northwestern University and her colleagues, published in Behavioral and Brain Functions in 2010, evaluates whether auditory training programs such as Fast ForWord® can alleviate the auditory processing deficits so frequently seen in ASD children.

Russo’s study examines how effectively Fast ForWord could strengthen the auditory processing of speech sounds in similar ASD children. Her team hypothesized that such training would modify the neural processing of sound in children with ASD, and that such children “would show improvement in the neural encoding of speech syllables, including faster response timing, greater fidelity of the response relative to the stimulus, and more accurate pitch encoding over time.” (p. 3)

Results showed that training appeared to have benefited all participants in the experimental group, affecting their neural transcription of speech. According to Russo and her team, “each of the five children who underwent FFW training improved on at least one measure of cortical speech processing relative to the control group, with response timing improving in both quiet and noise for some children.” (p. 13)

Russo and her team were able to conclude that directed auditory training using Fast ForWord shows great promise for improving auditory processing in children with ASD – specifically, those high-functioning children who have hearing in the typical range. 

 

Content:  This study was published in Behavioral and Brain Functions in 2010 and was done at Northwestern University by Dr. Nicole Russo and her colleagues.   It evaluates whether auditory training programs, such as Fast ForWord, can alleviate the auditory processing deficits so frequently seen in children with autism spectrum disorders. Children with autism spectrum disorders or ASD demonstrate impairments in their use of language for social and communicative purposes.  These impairments are typically apparent prior to three years of age.

There is emerging evidence that the neural encoding of speech sounds may be impaired in some children with autism spectrum disorders leading to atypical auditory brainstem responses to speech sounds and difficulties processing speech-specific stimuli such as detecting speech in background noise. 

Since the Fast ForWord products provide auditory training including listening and sound-sequencing exercises, as well as exercises on auditory attention, auditory discrimination, phoneme discrimination, and memory, Dr Russo and her colleagues were interested in investigating the impact of the products on children with ASD.

High-functioning children with ASD who had participated in an earlier study were invited to partake in this one.   The children all had a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.  They had typical peripheral hearing, average mental abilities and average or near-average language scores.

Eleven boys with an average age of 9.2 completed the entire testing protocol and met the criteria.   The children were then given the option of taking part in the intensive auditory training. Five children opted for the training and formed the experimental group.  The other six children who opted not to take part in the training were willing to take part in the post-test and formed the control group. There was not a significant difference between the two groups in terms of age, IQ, or language ability.

Students in the experimental group used the intense intervention: the Fast ForWord Language Series which entailed the Fast ForWord Language product for an average for 20 days followed by Fast ForWord Language to Reading for an average of 32 days.

Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and Event-Related Potentials (ERP’s) were recorded from both groups.  These tests measure the size and the timing of electrical activity that occurs in the brainstem and brain in response to a sound.  In this case, the sounds were synthesized vowels that were heard in the presence of background noise, as well as in quiet.  Auditory brainstem responses are subcortical events occurring less than 10 ms after the stimuli is presented while  event-related potentials are cortical events occurring a few hundred milliseconds after the stimuli is presented.  Both ABR’s and ERP’s measure the aggregate response of neurons and neither requires active involvement by the participant. 

Due to the small number of participants, and the variations between them, the analysis involved defining a “typical change” as the average change for students in the control group plus one standard deviation, and defining a “significant change” for one of the participants as a change that was more than the control’s change plus one standard deviation. 

The researchers were particularly interested in subjects that had two or more measures with significant change.  All five students improved more than one standard deviation on at least two tests. The researchers concluded that there is Initial evidence that directed auditory training may improve auditory processing in a specific population of children with ASD – specifically high-functioning children with ASD who have hearing in the typical range.

They also concluded that computer-based training may benefit some children with ASD by acting on biological processes.

Read the complete report on this research at the link below:

Nicole M Russo, N., Hornickel, J., Nicol, T. Zeckler, S. Kraus, N. Biological changes in auditory function following training in children with autism spectrum disorders. Behavioral and Brain Functions 2010, 6:60.

Related Reading:

Understanding Autism in Children

Language Skills Increase 1.8 Years After 30 Days Using Fast ForWord

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: auditory processing, autism, brain training, learning disabilities, processing rate, video

My Nephew Was A Struggling Learner (Not Anymore!): Carrie’s Story

• September 6, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

This post is the third in a series aimed at sharing the success stories, both personal and professional, that Scientific Learning employees witness every day.

Carrie's Story:

My name is Carrie. I'm a Marketing Specialist with Scientific Learning, and I have a story about Fast ForWord with my nephew, Izaak.  Back in 2006, he went to kindergarten for his first year.  At the end of kindergarten, his teacher told my brother and sister-in-law that although he had a beautiful smile and that beautiful smile could get him through the third grade, it wouldn’t get him past the third grade. 

He started with the Fast ForWord Language Basics program.  It took him five days to get through the product and then he went in to Fast ForWord Language.  Three or four days into Language Basics for Izaak, he was able to have a complete conversation with my brother and sister-in-law and my brother was just amazed that Izaak was able to actually have a conversation as opposed to short answers or short sentences. 

He got through the Language program.  He got back into kindergarten for his second year in the fall of 2006 and today he is at the top of his class.  It’s just very, very exciting to know that these products are life changing and they can make such a difference, and I am very grateful to all the founders and the people that have made the software what it is today so that kids all over the US and the world can…have their lives changed forever.

Related Reading:

Jolene’s Story: “I Saw Tremendous Change”

Leigh Ann’s Story: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives

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Categories: Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, early learning, employee stories, language learning, oral language skills, student growth, success stories, technology in education, video

Language Skills Increase 1.8 Years After 30 Days Using Fast ForWord

• August 25, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

This study is a randomized controlled trial that investigated the impact of Fast ForWord Language software in 9 elementary schools.  The analyses that follow include data from 452 students in grades K through 5. 

Students were randomly assigned to be in either the Fast ForWord group or the control group.  The randomization was stratified within age and gender.

Students using Fast ForWord trained for 100 minutes per day for an average of 30 school days.  Both groups were evaluated using three assessments:

• Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language
• Phonological Awareness Test
• Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Education Battery

The average gains from pre-test to post-test were larger for Fast ForWord participants than for the control group for both Language Comprehension and Phonological Isolation.  Both of these results were statistically significant.

In addition, a large subset of students in this study were English Language Learners.  A total of 85 students did not speak English as their primary language – 53 of whom used Fast ForWord, while 32 served as controls.  The results for English Language Learners were consistent with those for native English speakers.  Both of these results were statistically significant.

In conclusion, Fast ForWord participation led to significantly larger improvements than the control group in a variety of early language skills. 

The vast majority of students made learning gains; these students averaged 1.8 years of language improvement in only 30 school days.

These results are consistent for both ELL students and for native English speakers.

Finally, note that this study was conducted on the original version of Fast ForWord Language.  Since publication of this study in 2004, a new and enhanced version of Fast ForWord Language has been released (Fast ForWord Language version 2).

Related Reading:

Forecasting ROI from Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ Products

Reading in the Real World

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Categories: English Language Learners, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, elementary school learning, increased test scores, language learning, literacy, phonological awareness, technology in education, video

Implementation Fidelity: Maximizing Your Fast ForWord^® or Reading Assistant™ Investment

• August 11, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

What is Implementation Fidelity? It is Scientific Learning’s measure of how well Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant users are following product usage protocols.

In order to maximize a student’s benefit from Fast ForWord or Reading Assistant, users need to have an intensive and persistent experience.  This means using the products regularly and according to protocol.  The available Fast ForWord protocols are five days a week for 30, 40, 50, or 90 minutes per day.  For Reading Assistant, the protocols are 20, 30, or 40 minutes per day (depending on the grade band) for three days per week.  Adherence to these protocols helps students build on their daily successes.

This leads naturally to the following question:  How do you know if a student is having an intensive and persistent Fast ForWord or Reading Assistant experience?

Our answer is a concept called Implementation Fidelity.  Implementation Fidelity measures how closely users of Scientific Learning products are adhering to the recommended usage protocols.

There are three components to Implementation Fidelity:

• Completion Rate
• Attendance
• Participation

Each of these components can be measured at the individual student, classroom, or district level.

Implementation Fidelity components are measured on a scale from 0 to 100%.  Scores in the top 20% are considered “Good,” scores in the middle 60% are considered “Fair,” and the remaining scores in the bottom 20% are considered “Poor.”

Scientific Learning Progress Tracker is an online tool to monitor and manage Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant success.

Progress Tracker has reports to help customers track the Implementation Fidelity of their students.  For example, one Implementation Fidelity report shows the overall Completion Rate, Attendance, and Participation categories for a district as a whole and for each school in that district.

We have found that a good implementation, on average, leads to 50% more reading gain per year.

Related Reading:

Forecasting ROI from Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ Products

Making Computerized Learning Work Takes WORK

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Categories: Fast ForWord, Progress Tracker, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, improving reading skills, learning to read, motivating students, reading intervention, school leader effectiveness, student growth, technology in education, video

Student Reading Improvement Nearly Doubles In Just 24 Days

• June 28, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

This video summarizes a study of Fast ForWord Reading 1—the first product in Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord Reading Series.

The study is a randomized controlled trial that investigated the impact of Fast ForWord Reading 1 in three elementary schools.  The analyses that follow include data from 208 students in 1^st and 2^nd grade.

Students were randomly assigned to be in either the Fast ForWord group or the control group.  The randomization was stratified within grade.

Students using Fast ForWord trained for 48 minutes per day for an average of 24 school days.  Both groups were evaluated using the Test of Phonological Awareness, or the “TOPA” for short. 

There were two subtests: one for Phonological Awareness, and one for Letter-Sounds.

For each subtest, the Fast ForWord participants showed greater gains between pre-test and post-test than the control group.  These differences were both statistically significant.

In conclusion, Fast ForWord participation led to significantly larger improvements than the control group in both the Phonological Awareness and Letter Sounds subtests.

In both cases, the magnitude of the gains was about double for Fast ForWord participants: 12.8 points versus 6.9 for Phonological Awareness, and 5.5 versus 1.9 points for Letter Sounds.

Related Reading:

Fast ForWord Featured on ABC 7 News

After Just 24 Days, Summer School Students Significantly Improve Reading Scores

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, elementary school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, increased test scores, learning to read, phonemic awareness, phonics, phonological awareness, student growth, student reading improvement, technology in education, TOPA, video

Forecasting ROI from Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ Products

• June 21, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

Return on Investment, or “ROI” is a straightforward concept.  With educational interventions, we invest something (typically time, money, or energy) and receive some benefit. 

The primary benefit of investing time, money, and energy in Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ products is increased student achievement.  This benefit has always been a focus for Scientific Learning.   However, in our discussions with customers, we realized that many district stakeholders had a parallel benefit that they are concerned with: the financial impact on their district as a whole.  We decided to see if we could address and quantify this parallel (and perhaps complementary) view of ROI.

We identified four areas where data suggest that implementation of Scientific Learning products can impact a district’s financial costs:

• Reduction of the high school dropout rate
• Reduction of referrals to special education
• Reduction of the number of students who require ELL services
• Reduction of the number of students classified as “struggling readers”

Here’s an example of how we tried to quantify one of these benefits.  A district in Swartz Creek, Michigan observed a 30% drop year-over-year in special education referrals after implementing Fast ForWord products with their students. To be safe, we chose a very statistically conservative estimate for the reduction a new customer might expect to see in their special education referral rates: 21.2%.  Technically, we got this by looking at the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval for the effect based on the Swartz Creek data.  

These estimates led to the creation of Scientific Learning’s Return on Investment Tool.  The tool estimates the ROI—that is, the true financial cost—of using Scientific Learning products over a three year horizon.  This includes the initial software purchase and three years of product support. Note that we often see ROIs greater than 100% (i.e. a net financial benefit) for medium to large implementations with lots of students.

If we take a look at a three-year ROI for a large implementation, in year one the costs exceed the financial benefits, but in subsequent years the products more than pay for themselves.  Actual estimates will depend greatly on the individual district and the scope of the implementation. 

To get an ROI estimate for your school or district, contact us.

Related Reading:

Over 45% Relative Improvement in Students Reaching Proficiency

79% of ELL Students Increase Proficiency by One or More Levels

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, English Language Learners, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research, Special Education

Tags: high school learning, increased test scores, investing in innovation, school leader effectiveness, struggling readers, student growth, technology in education, video

Grammar Skill Improvement with Fast ForWord Software

• May 19, 2011 by Barbara Calhoun, Ph.D

This study was part of Dr. Beth Rogowsky’s doctoral research and was published in her dissertation in 2010.  At the time of this study, Dr. Rogowsky was an experienced educator.  Returning for her doctorate at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, Dr. Rogowsky was interested in data-driven decisions, and wanted to know whether the Fast ForWord products would improve the grammatical skills of a group of typical middle school students.  The middle school in which Dr. Rogowsky taught had four marking periods each year.  During each marking period, students took two elective courses. 

During the 2009-2010 school year, the sixth graders were randomly assigned to use Fast ForWord during one of their electives; one-fourth of the students during each marking period.  The students who used Fast ForWord during the 3^rd marking period formed the experimental group in Dr. Rogowsky’s study while the students who were scheduled to use Fast ForWord later formed the comparison group.  Students’ grammar skills were evaluated at the beginning and end of the 3^rd marking period.

Study participants were 81 sixth graders.  Group 1 consisted of 40 students who used Fast ForWord during the third marking period.  Group 2 consisted of 41 students who did not use Fast ForWord until after the study was over.  Students were assessed at the beginning and end of the study (January and April).

Using the 40-Minute protocols that require students to use the products 40 minutes a day, five days a week, the students first used Fast ForWord Literacy.  After they finished Fast ForWord Literacy, students used Fast ForWord Reading Level 2.  Students were evaluated at the start of the study, and again at the end, with the Written Expression Scale from the Oral and Written Language Scales, also known as the OWLS.  The written section evaluates students’ knowledge of convention and content.  Convention covers a variety of areas including spelling, capitalization and punctuation, linguistics, modifiers, phrases, verb form while content includes details, coherence, unity, and the presence of supporting ideas.  Students are scored on a scale where 100 is average, and the standard deviation is 15.

At the start of the study, there was not a statistically significant difference between the scores of the students in the two groups.  On average, students in both groups were a bit above the 50^th percentile which corresponds to a score of 100. However, after the experimental group used the Fast ForWord products, there was a statistically significant difference between the scores of the two groups, and there were statistically significant increases in the scores of the group that had used Fast ForWord products. The results of this study led Dr. Rogowsky to conclude that the Fast ForWord products can improve students’ grammar skills and the improvements are evident in a classwide implementation.

Rogowsky, B. (2010). The Impact of Fast ForWord® on Sixth Grade Students’ Use of Standard Edited American English. Doctor of Education dissertation, Wilkes University. 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, brain training, increased test scores, middle school learning, student growth, technology in education, video, writing

Students Exceed State Average on TAKS after Fast ForWord, Maintain Gains

• April 20, 2011 by Melissa Agocs

Since the 2004-2005 school year, the Dallas Independent School District has used the Fast ForWord products in many of their high schools. This multi-year study followed more than 500 high school students from 20 schools over the years of their Fast ForWord participation.   This study shows impressive longitudinal results on the TAKS which is The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills which is administered annually throughout Texas and is closely aligned with the state curricular standards.   A longitudinal study is a type of study that follows the same subjects over time.

Students started with the Fast ForWord Middle & High School product, now known as the Fast ForWord Literacy product. Many went on to use the Fast ForWord Language to Reading and Fast ForWord to Reading products. On average, students spent 60 days using the products during a 5 ½ month period.

 The scores of Fast ForWord participants moved in step with the state average until the students started to use Fast ForWord products.  During the year of Fast ForWord product use, the participants experienced accelerated learning that separated their performance from that of their peers.  Even up to two years after they finished using the products, the Fast ForWord participants maintained their improvements. The TAKS gains made during the study were statistically larger for the Dallas Fast ForWord participants than the gains made by their statewide peers.

Related Reading:

Why Time Matters in Learning

After Just 24 Days, Summer School Students Significantly Improve Reading Scores

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: accelerate learning, achievement gap, assessments, high school learning, increased test scores, reading test gains, student reading growth, TAKS, technology in education, Texas, video