Having used Fast ForWord for 11 years and Reading Assistant for about six years, I know the value of these programs when delivered as designed.
My colleague, Marilyn Edwards in the Chilliwack School District, recently shared this with me:
“I also think that those of us who have seen the best and the worst of implementations (FFW and others too) know that the devil is in the details and it’s the teachers/coaches/leaders who make it successful or not.
When I came across that Hechinger Report about Dr. Aguillard, it nailed it for me. The leadership at the top needs to envision how the pieces of the educational puzzle need to fit, and then oversee the implementation to make it happen.
I appreciate how he saw FFW as a piece of the plan, but he seems to have amazing skills to create a whole initiative where every part is educationally sound. I’m sure his competence is inspiring to educators in his District, which those of us in education know, is a very powerful motivation to pitch in and do our best.”
The percentage of proficient students increased from 55% to 81%
St. Mary Parish School District is a rural district in southern Louisiana. The district started using the Fast ForWord products during the 2006 – 2007 school year, with eight elementary schools that were in Academic Assistance, a designation for schools that fail to improve sufficiently. At the start of the 2008 – 2009 school year, for the first time in years, no schools in the district were rated “Academically Unacceptable.” The graph shows the increased proficiency of fourth graders on the LEAP, Louisiana’s state assessment.
You can learn more about the successes in St. Mary Parish in this Hechinger Report piece by Dr. Donald Aguillard. Here are some excerpts from the article:
Improving reading proficiency:
In 2006-07, despite our best efforts, many students were still struggling readers. Our challenge wasn’t necessarily that our programs were ineffective. It was that we weren’t meeting the individual needs of students. We realized that to make the most of our programs, we needed to address students’ reading skills while concurrently developing their memory, attention, processing and sequencing skills.
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Toward that end, we installed computer labs and Fast ForWord reading intervention software in eight elementary schools in Academic Assistance. In 2008, for the first time in a decade, we exceeded the state average for the percentage of initial testing fourth graders reading at or above the Basic level on our state test. So, over the next two years, we extended the Fast ForWord program to all our schools. We also added Reading Assistant, an online reading tool that uses speech recognition to correct and support students as they read aloud, building their fluency and comprehension.
Across the curriculum, students are benefitting from our continuing efforts to help them improve their reading and learning ability through these programs. Among the results of a five-year longitudinal study were improvements in state test scores in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies with fourth graders who used the programs. We also improved eighth grade state test scores, increased fourth grade promotion rates, reduced the number of students requiring special education services, and narrowed the achievement gap.
