Teaching Methodology in ReadingDoctor® Online

ReadingDoctor® Online uses a unique, patent pending teaching methodology which is based on decades of scientific research on reading acquisition. Most importantly, a growing number of studies provide evidence for the effectiveness of Reading Doctor in improving students' reading ability.

Reading Doctor® Online uses a unique, highly effective, patented system to teach children to associate letters and letter patterns with the sounds they represent. It also teaches blending, segmentation, sight word recognition and other key literacy skills found through research to be crucial in the development of reading and spelling ability.

The program automatically adjusts learning support for each student. It identifies each student's skill strengths and weaknesses. It spends less time on established skills, and more time with more support on areas of skill weakness, leading to fast and effective learning.

Unfamiliar items to be learnt are presented to the student with visual, auditory and articulatory 'scaffolding' in the form of self adjusting, memory aids (mnemonics) that are automatically faded out as students master the skills they are learning:

The diagram below shows the scaffolding used to teach a student the relationship between the letter 'a' and the speech sound it typically represents in spoken English (the /a/ sound at the beginning of the word /apple/). When the student provides correct responses, the level of scaffolding (i.e. help) is reduced until the student is able to identify the target without any assistance. If the student makes a mistake, the scaffolding returns to assist the student until they master the target.

If the student does not make any mistakes for an item, that item is quickly eliminated from the activity. If a student makes a mistake, the scaffolding for the item that was presented as well as the item the student selected is reset to its maximum level. In this way, students spend less time on easier items and more time practicing difficult targets, which are also presented with more scaffolding to facilitate learning.

In the example above, the student is being taught the single letter-sound relationships for 's,a,t,p,i,n,e'. The student successfully completes the 's,a,t,p' and 'n' items but has confused 'i' and 'e'. The program has reset the scaffold for these two items so that the student gets more help and more practice discriminating between 'i' and 'e' compared with the other items.

ReadingDoctor® Online continually adjusts items to be learnt for students in this way, so that students spend less time on skills they have already learnt while having more practice and support in more diffcult areas.