MOBILE PERFORMANCE SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS TEACHING FIRST GRADERS TO READ

Abstract

Teaching to read is a very complex task. There are two rival strategies, and while one of them is effective according to an extensive empirical evidence, many teachers and parents use the wrong strategy or an inefficient mix of them. In this paper we use an app that supports teachers in measuring students’ progress and in communicating learning strategies with parents. It also supports parents to share their strategies to teach their children at home, and supports educational administrators to track students learning, in each one of the curriculum units, at each school, district and geographical region. In a semester the app was voluntarily adopted by 1,235 schools that tracked the progress of 30,158 students. We found a very rapid adoption of the app, a surprisingly big imbalance between the intended and implemented curriculum, a much lower student performance in writing than in reading and oral communication, and a strikingly great participation and enthusiasm of parents in creating videos to share them with other parents where they show playful strategies to teach reading to their kids.