Selected for Success:
How Headsprout Reading Basics™ Teaches Beginning Reading
T. V. Joe Layng, Ph.D.
Janet S. Twyman, Ph.D.
Greg Stikeleather, MA.
Section II
Learning Methodologies: Foundational and Flexible
Headsprout also derives its success from a methodology that incorporates four key pedagogical frameworks:
Headsprout's carefully designed instructional sequence allows learners to start with things they know or can easily do and builds instruction from there. This enables learners to make fewer mistakes and reduces the frustration of trial and error learning. Errors that are made are used as teaching opportunities and the learner is always provided the opportunity to retry and succeed at the task.
Headsprout Reading Basics allows children to practice and learn until they've mastered the skill. The program ensures that a learner does not exit an instructional segment without achieving the specific learning goal. For example, a learner may be asked to make five consecutive correct letter/sound discriminations. This might take one learner just 5 responses. Another may give some wrong answers, be diverted into a brief tutorial session, and then return to the initial task where five consecutive correct is still be required for exit. Learners that may have required more instruction or practice opportunities, still exit meeting the mastery criteria.
Headsprout wants every learner to achieve fluency. For example, in a letter/sound discrimination task, fluency may be defined as the ability to consistently, quickly, and accurately identify sound and letter combinations. Fluency improves the retention of new skills, enhances the comprehension of new material, and facilitates the recognition of new words. This builds confidence and accelerates reading as a whole. When learners read words, time criteria are introduced such that word reading becomes more automatic. This is extended to sentence and story reading as well. Fluent oral-reading examples are provided as models and confirmation that emphasize both rate and prosody.
Headsprout further improves the retention of fresh reading skills with its process of cumulative review. Skills-not pieces of information-are revisited, reused and extended. Children aren't merely memorizing information; they're learning the "hows" of reading which stick with them-just like riding a bicycle-even when there's been a significant period of no or little practice.
Headsprout's multifaceted methodology thus gives rise to instruction that is tailored to meet the needs of each learner-and ensures that those needs are met before the lesson comes to an end. The idea of continual adaptation-and evolution-influences Headsprout Reading Basics in many ways. Headsprout supports its reduced error program with moment-to-moment adaptation based on each learner response. According to a learner's frequency and ratio of corrects and errors, click rate, or error patterns, the program immediately adjusts to offer the most beneficial lesson for that learner. Although the core of instruction is the same for everyone, some quick detours-reminders and review sessions (subroutines in the program)-are downloaded in the background, ready to pop up and provide extra skill building and reinforcement if needed. Headsprout is thus predicated upon a flexible constant: learners' overall experiences and session lengths can vary as their successes and errors vary, but all of them emerge from each episode having shown their acquisition of the same target skills. No one moves on to the next episode until he or she has successfully completed the one at hand.
In another example of adaptation, new approaches to teaching are continually tested against existing approaches. Methods that produce the greatest learner success are "selected," with those methods that are less successful dropping out. This commitment to learner testing helps ensure a continuous evolution of the program governed by learner success.
Nine teaching routines comprise the core of Headsprout Reading Basics. An overview of the instructional design process may be found elsewhere (Twyman, Layng, Stikeleather & Hobbins, in press), and greater elaboration and developmental data for each routine is being prepared for future publication, the nine routines may be summarized as follows:
Establishing Routines rapidly teach a learner the initial phonetic and other sound/symbol components of reading. These routines establish sound/symbol guidance over a young speaker's verbal behavior, and transfer that control to textual stimuli, the decoding basis of reading. The careful sequence of specific component skills promotes the rapid acquisition of basic reading strategies. The establishing routine is unique in the way visual and auditory stimuli are presented and sequenced, and in the way learner behavior is confirmed or corrected. The establishing routine is also used to teach whole word reading when that is required.
Adduction routines are a special subset of establishing routines that promote the rapid acquisition of new skills with little or no direct learner instruction (Andronis, Layng & Goldiamond, 1997). Environments are created that recruit elements of previously learned skills into new skill sets, obviating the need to build these new elements independently. Adduction routines have uniquely designed presentation, confirmation, and correction subroutines.
Vocal potentiation routines (after Goldiamond & Dyrud, 1967) encourage learner-spoken behavior in the absence of an independent listener or voice recognition capabilities. The potentiating routine has uniquely designed presentation, confirmation, and correction subroutines that bring learner spoken behavior under the guidance of textual stimuli and their own discriminative repertoire.
Blending and segmenting routines teach the learner a strategy for using sound elements to decode a word. The strategy ultimately requires the learner to hold each sound in a word until the next sound is vocalized. Ultimately, the learner must say the "stretched" word quickly, as one would normally say the word. While this routine is similar to a strategy some other reading programs employ, Headsprout's specific, four-step sequence for teaching each part of the strategy, and linking the steps together (particularly in the absence of an independent listener), is unique.
Sentence and story routines are used to establish meaningful reading. Learners learn word order and sentence sense by first hearing and clicking the words as a narrator reads them, then the learner reads the words as highlighted by the software. Finally, the learner reads the sentence and clicks on a picture indicating what the sentence was about. Stories are then introduced where the learner is released to read independently, applying previously learned skills in a story context. Both comprehension indicators and story indicators are used for these exercises.
Fluency routines are timed, guided-practice exercises that assure retention of newly acquired reading skills after significant periods of no practice, and make application of those skills much more likely (Anderson, Fincham & Douglass, 1999; Johnson & Layng, 1996). Each routine has carefully constructed practice aims, confirmation routines, and correction routines, which are unique to the practice environment. Fluency routines are also designed to adapt to the learners practice history and automatically set practice goals based on that history.
Motivation routines define the contexts in which the previously described routines are embedded and applied. These contexts provide for both program extrinsic consequences (after Goldiamond, 1974), such as vocal praise, fun sounds, and short cartoon movies, and program specific consequences (after Goldiamond, 1974) that occur directly as a function of reading in a social environment.
Application routines include graphic-intensive activities that allow learners to demonstrate their reading skills in real-world contexts, such as interacting with cartoon characters, reading stories in duets with a parent/guardian, and playing mystery or travel games. Application routines also include reading new words and sentences previously untaught and selecting pictures that illustrate the meaning of the word or sentence.
Overall sequencing of routines is also critical to the program's success. Teaching objectives are achieved by the specific mixed and interlocking sequences of the routines described above. Although currently implemented to teach reading, these nine routines may be employed to teach any type of paired associate, multiple discrimination, algorithmic, concept, principle, or strategy learning objective.
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