The Foundations Learning System™ is an assessment and intervention solution designed for students from second grade through high school who struggle with reading comprehension and fluency due to poor word recognition skills. The System combines a screener, diagnostic and intervention, along with curriculum guides and detailed reporting, into an integrated solution to change academic outcomes for persistently struggling readers who have been failed by traditional instruction and interventions.

 

Formats:

The Foundations Learning System operates on multiple devices and operating systems, including Google Chrome, and is also available through the App Store.

 

Website:

https://www.foundations-learning.com/foundations-learning-system/

 

What does it help with?

Millions of dollars are spent each year on reading instruction and intervention, yet NAEP research shows that two-thirds of U.S. students still lack reading proficiency and at least one-half of these students lack adequate basic word recognition skills. This is a crisis with lifelong implications.

The Foundations Learning System addresses this challenge by applying the learning framework known as the “Varied Practice Model,” which is proven to enhance automatic skill development in many other domains—including sports, music, language and math—to the development of automatic word recognition skills, an essential precursor of fluency and reading comprehension.

The System enables educators to quickly identify and help students whose academic progress has stagnated due to a lack of foundational reading skills and delivers a highly effective, research-based intervention tailored to their needs. The integrated intervention has five components:

  • Online screener—Enables educators to quickly identify whether students have deficits in automatic word recognition skills.
  • Online diagnostic—Identifies specific gaps in decoding knowledge and measures automaticity of word recognition.
  • Online intervention—Delivers personalized online instruction, giving students the chance to encounter the materials from multiple perspectives.
  • Curriculum guides—Support teacher-facilitated instruction by providing a wealth of resources and lesson plans to deepen and extend learning to new contexts.
  • Reports—Teachers and administrators can access reports to track and monitor students’ performance as they progress through the system.

 

 

Grade and age range:

The Foundations Learning System is designed for students in second grade through high school who are one or more years behind grade level in reading ability, as well as those who persistently struggle with reading fluency and comprehension. Students who benefit from the Foundations Learning System exhibit one or more of the following reading challenges:

  • Are one or more years behind in reading
  • Struggle with comprehension and fluency
  • Do not decode well — lack automaticity
  • Struggle to identify/distinguish vowels
  • Do not understand how syllables work or have difficulty breaking words into syllables
  • Cannot apply the rules of phonics to new words or to connected text

 

Purpose:

The Foundations Learning System combines innovative online learning with teacher-led instruction and can be used either as a student’s primary literacy intervention or as a supplemental intervention. This powerful system allows teachers to accurately assess students’ literacy skills and deliver personalized and differentiated instruction in a blended learning environment. It helps to build students’ foundational literacy skills by offering an extensive suite of resources, curriculum guides, and daily lesson plans that work to extend vocabulary development, fluency, comprehension, and writing. These supplementary materials align with and reinforce the online learning components.

 

Standards:

The Foundations Learning System directly addresses many foundational reading skills as described in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts. These include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Print Concepts (4 out of 5 Standards)
  • Phonological Awareness (9 out of 9 Standards)
  • Phonics and Word Recognition (23 out of 23 Standards)
  • Fluency (16 out of 16 Standards)

 

Lesson time needed:

Students in need of intervention use the Foundations Learning System at least 20 minutes a day, four or five days a week, and typically complete the curriculum in five to six months. Depending on student learning needs, teachers deliver supplementary lessons two to five times a week to deepen learning and ensure success.

 

Pricing model:

You may contact Foundations Learning System for a demo and a quote: https://www.foundations-learning.com/contact/

Other services:

The Foundations Learning System consists of five components:

  • Online screener—In just 20 minutes, the screener enables educators to quickly identify whether students have deficits in automatic word recognition skills.
  • Online diagnostic—In three 20-minute sessions, the diagnostic identifies specific gaps in decoding knowledge and measures automaticity of word recognition. The Foundations Diagnostic is the only scaled measure of automatic word recognition currently available.
  • Online intervention—Based on students’ specific gaps, the intervention delivers personalized online instruction through 24 structured units organized around the Varied Practice Model, giving students the chance to encounter the materials from multiple perspectives.
  • Curriculum guides—These guides support teacher-facilitated instruction by providing a wealth of resources, including poems and passages, curriculum packets, and daily lesson plans to reinforce the development of automatic word recognition skills, improve reading fluency, and deepen and extend learning to new contexts that include vocabulary, comprehension and writing.
  • Reports—Teachers and administrators can access reports to track and monitor students’ performance as they progress through the system.

 

Professional development training and support:

Initial Training (Onsite 2.5 – 3 hours)

  • Discussion of challenges faced by struggling readers
  • Introduction of Varied Practice Model and its application to reading
  • Overview of the Foundations Learning System with hands-on exploration
  • Interpretation of screening results and selection of students who qualify for intervention     Establish implementation goals

Two follow up live webinars (1 - 1.5 hours)

  • Discuss blended model of instruction
  • Review resources to extend and deepen student knowledge
  • Discuss implementation goals and troubleshoot challenges
  • Analyze reports to review student progress and identify areas of need

Regular summary updates of student usage and progress

  • Email alerts identify students having difficulties
  • Transition emails inform teachers as students meet progress milestones
  • Usage notifications track student participation
  • Assessment notifications track student progress

 

What makes Foundations Learning System unique?

The Foundations Learning System is the only solution that brings the science of automaticity to reading assessment and intervention, an approach that can enhance and/or replace the repetition-based, linear interventions that have failed so many challenged readers for so long. It has been proven effective for students who struggle with decoding, comprehension and fluency; are unable to consistently identify and distinguish vowels; do not understand how syllables work or have difficulty breaking words into syllables; or who cannot quickly and automatically apply the rules of phonics to new words or to connected text.

The System is also unique in its application of the Varied Practice Model, which is proven to enhance automatic skill development in many other domains—including sports, music, language and math—to the development of automatic word recognition skills, an essential precursor of fluency and reading comprehension.

Research scientists Dr. Carolyn Brown and Dr. Jerry Zimmermann, co-founders of Foundations in Learning, have spent more than 30 years studying the needs of struggling readers, and the Foundations Learning System is built on 10 years of research and product development. For the development of the diagnostic, they collaborated with scientists from the University of Iowa; Dr. Deborah Reed, Dr. Bob McMurray, Dr. Eliot Hazeltine and Dr. Keith Apfelbaum. Support was provided by the SBIR program at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences under contract ED-IES-15-C-0023. Foundations in Learning has also received support from the National Institutes of Health and the state of Iowa to develop and test strategies that work.

 

Characteristics:

Student User Interface and instructional design

 

End-of-objective Assessments provide progress monitoring for improvements in:

  • Decoding
  • Syllable use
  • Word recognition (untimed)
  • Word recognition (timed)

 

Here’s what users are saying:

The results at Crossroads Elementary are impressive. The school was rated as the only “high-performing” school in the district in 2018. As a whole, the school scored 86% on a key reading proficiency measure at the conclusion of last year, with third grade students who received a Foundations in Learning intervention experiencing an average increase in growth  that was 10 points higher than their academic peers that did not receive it. Importantly, teachers now have a better understanding of how decoding and word recognition affects reading fluency and have able to make an even greater impact.

Crossroads Elementary, Des Moines, IA

 

“This program empowered us to gather more precise information on students' specific strengths and weaknesses and implement instruction tailored to their individual needs.”

- Jennifer Abramson, Leander ISD, TX

 

“My language arts resource students made remarkable growth in their ability to tackle longer, multisyllabic words, and this translated to better fluency and greater confidence. On average, they made 1.8 years of growth in approximately seven months as measured on the Qualitative Reading Inventory."

- Christina Sorenson, Leander ISD, TX

 

“An assessment that assists teachers in early, accurate diagnosis of their students’ reading challenges is particularly necessary given the difficulties too many face while developing foundational reading skills”

- Dr. Donna Ryan, Superintendent, Clinch County Schools

 

“Students with severe reading difficulties were reading. The most wonderful blessings were watching them succeed for the first time and feel like true readers.”

- Marsha Allen, Santa Fe, NM

 

“It has helped with confidence, oral reading, fluency and decoding skills. My goal is that they feel more empowered to become lifelong readers, even if aspects of it are hard.”

- Jill Powell, Sioux Falls, SD

 

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