The landmark report Eager to Learn: Educating our Preschoolers highlights that young children are better able to learn than current practices sometimes allow. An educational preschool experience with the goal of preparing children for kindergarten means including more academic areas such as letters and counting, as well as, helping build traits like being inquisitive, persistent, and independent. Young children from disadvantaged backgrounds in particular, will experience significant difficulties in learning to read and in gaining foundational mathematics skill. As a result, they will lag far behind most children their age, often never catching up. The encouraging news is that many problems in reading and math can be prevented through providing children who do not have the basic skills with instruction before they are exposed to a formal reading setting. This is especially the case for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as giving them access to enriching early learning experiences can facilitate starting kindergarten on a more level playing field with their more advantaged peers. Instructional technology is strongly emerging as having the capability to play a key role in this preparation. Experts confirm that preschool age children are developmentally ready and able to benefit from instruction with technology and it can have a major, positive impact on the social, emotional, language,and cognitive development of children. It is recommended that many opportunities be given during the preschool years for exploration using technology tools in a playful,supportive environment with attention to developmental appropriateness, including making connections in a meaningful way to the curriculum and in support of creativity and critical thinking. It is in this spirit that Hatch commissioned a study of the effectiveness of the TeachSmart Learning System. Completed over the 2009-2010 school year, the purpose of this study was to determine if preschool age children in classrooms using the TeachSmart Learning System (TSLS)-an instructional technology tool with pre-designed content delivered through an interactive touch screen whiteboard-would make significant gains in literacy and mathematics. The results strongly indicate this was the case. Over a six-month period these low-income children increased overall in emergent literacy, and specifically in print knowledge, phonological awareness, and emergent writing. Their significant increase in math was represented by growth in counting, operations, and shape naming and discrimination. These results were true for a randomly selected group of children and for a larger sample including additional children who were not randomly selected. The importance of this finding is twofold:
- The literacy and math skills on which these at-risk preschool children increased are known to be predictors of success in school, both in the short-term in kindergarten and first grade, and beyond to have an impact on their entire schooling experience.
- The study supports that instructional technology as both a vehicle for presenting information and as a vehicle for bringing strong content, can be used successfully with young children in early childhood education settings.
Learn more about the TeachSmart™ Learning System
The post Relationship of the TeachSmart Learning System with Literacy and Math Outcomes for Preschoolers appeared first on Hatch.
