Early Childhood Management Services (ECMS) - Victoria
The Literacy and Numeracy Partnerships Pilot Project provided an opportunity within a Victorian early childhood setting to examine and encourage parents, early childhood teachers and other members of the community to support children’s early development in the key learning areas of literacy and numeracy.
An important focus of the project was finding new ways to share information and activities with parents and the home environment.
Four important themes guided the project’s activities which acknowledged the important roles played by families, preschool teachers, and community agencies in young children’s early literacy and numeracy development. These were:
- children’s interest and motivation to learn about print and numbers – the project prompted preschool staff to consider the ways their programs captivate children’s motivation through their own work with children and more indirectly, through shared activities with the children’s families;
- the adult role in promoting children’s literacy and numeracy learning – this theme was used to create an awareness of the importance of active interactions between children and adults;
- parents as teachers – acknowledging the positive influences of home experiences on children’s progress at school; and
- the role of community agencies – focusing on the information that parents seek regarding their child’s literacy and numeracy development and what opportunities existed to share information and advice to parents.
Parents involved in the project were given the opportunity to express their insights about their children’s development and learning. Overall, the project has demonstrated that literacy and numeracy learning by young children is a community process and that parents, preschool staff and other agencies need more opportunities to share in their understanding about their roles in this learning.
Banardos - ACT
The primary objective of the Homework Groups Project was the establishment of after school homework groups for educationally disadvantaged students. The project provided volunteer tutoring for students in subject areas in which they were experiencing difficulty. Students worked in small groups bringing together both upper primary and lower secondary school students. The Homework Groups project was run in five different venues and 30 disadvantaged students between the ages of 6 and 14 received group tuition. The volunteer tutors came from a diverse range of occupations, including retired principals and teachers, accountants, parents, journalists and students.
The Homework Group project proved to be significantly beneficial and useful for the volunteer tutors and students involved. An improvement in educational and social achievement was evident in the progress made by some of the students. Students expressed a high level of satisfaction with the Homework Groups Project and valued the relationship and friendships they had established with the tutors. These special friendships worked effectively to provide extra support for both tutors and students. Volunteer tutors commented on the challenge of working with students of varying abilities and home situations and expressed their interest in networking with other tutors to share ideas for working with young children. Overall, the Homework Groups Project filled a significant need within the Canberra educational community and provided an important service to a particular group of students who might otherwise be greatly disadvantaged in their school years.
James Cook University - Queensland
The Oracy and Literacy Development in a Culturally Diverse Schools project developed and evaluated an approach to promoting early literacy learning for children of diverse cultural backgrounds through a focus on oracy, including phonemic awareness. The project arose from previous work on early literacy and aimed to extend that work by focusing on aspects found to be successful in the earlier trial.
The project found that while total student scores showed improvement, students varied in terms of which elements of phonological awareness were answered correctly, so that a global score on the test meant different things for different students. This was important given the research findings of varying contributions to literacy learning by different aspects of phonological awareness. Indigenous students in the study showed a similar range of performance. The importance of individual and small group work in addressing the needs of students having difficulty in early literacy learning was apparent. Results also showed that neither the phonemic awareness program nor the classroom experiences were meeting the needs of some students.
Results from the project highlight a number of implications such as the complexity of assessing the performance of individual children and the range of factors which influence student learning. It was apparent that teachers, speech pathologists, teacher aides and other support personnel need to share a common understanding of student needs and various ways to meet them. A coordinated, expert, flexible and responsive program will require considerable resources of time, personnel and expertise. In addition, the report demonstrated that oracy and phonological awareness are important components of early literacy which may require special provision from some children and that this would be best achieved through an integrated range of one on one, small group and whole class activities.
Macquarie University - NSW
The primary purpose of the project was to improve the literacy skills of indigenous students through the development and implementation of a home-book reading and associated literacy activities program.
The project involved engaging careers at home and in activities designed to support the literacy experiences of kindergarten children from indigenous background who were at risk of problems in learning to read. Members of the children’s community were involved in the selection and preparation of resources (books, games, audio-tape recordings) used by participating children and their families.
The project was successful in strengthening collaborative links between schools and their communities. Members of the Jarara Indigenous community, the Indigenous Catholic Education Unit and Aboriginal Education Assistants were all involved in both the development and implementation of the early literacy program. Many parents commented that they had learned how to help their children prepare for learning to read by using games and changing their reading strategies when book-reading, for example, asking questions about the actual story, pointing to words as they read and checking that their child had understood the story by asking or encouraging the child to retell what had happened.
The project also had a strong positive impact on the children’s early literacy skills. Assessments on a standardised reading test showed that at the end of the intervention period, some of the children’s reading age was, on average, five months ahead of their chronological age. It was apparent that children who reported that they had lots of books at home achieved higher listening comprehension scores at the pre-test than children who said that they did not have many books at home. The Bridging the Gap programme provided both an excellent framework for establishing positive linkages between home and school and supporting the development of listening comprehensions and language skills for indigenous at-risk students.
The University of New England - NSW
The QuickSmart program was designed to improve the basic literacy and numeracy skills of low-achieving middle-school students. The project investigated the effects of improved automacity of basic skills on higher-order processes such as comprehension and problem solving. The underlying rationale for the program was that improving automaticity in component skills, such as decoding or calculating, frees up working memory resources. This freeing up of resources allows students to focus inherent attention demanding higher-order cognitive activities, of the sort increasingly required of students in the middle-school years.
The research highlighted a number of important findings:
- the important role of efficient working memory use in student’s successful engagement with academic tasks related to numeracy and literacy;
- that students may be precluded from achieving acceptable standards of literacy and numeracy due to inefficient strategy use, failure to transfer learning, poor motivation to practice and generally negative beliefs about the self as a learner; and,
- many common learning obstacles that originally precluded participants achieving age-appropriate academic outcomes in literacy and numeracy can be overcome by (i) explicit strategy and content instruction, and (ii) the systematic use of focused and timed practice activities.
Although further research is necessary to firmly establish the usefulness of the QuickSmart approach to improving the performance of students who have difficulty with basic academic skills, there was evidence within this project that intervention has made a difference to those students involved. The most marked differences occurred for the students in Year 5. While students from Year 7 also benefited, the logistical challenges associated with implementing an intensive intervention in a high school setting across many different teachers and subjects were considerable. Nevertheless, the experience gained through this project mean that further interventions by the researchers will be easier to manage.
Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT) - Victoria
The primary purpose of this project was to conduct a cross sectoral project to support improved literacy and numeracy outcomes of Year 8 students performing below the benchmarks at Reservoir District Secondary College (RDSC). The project had four main aims:
1. To develop and implement a project-based program for Year 8 students at RDSC.
2. To develop and implement a series of professional development workshops for teachers of years 8, 9 and 10 students.
3. To implement at mentor program between NMIT’s Access Department literacy and numeracy teachers and literacy aides at RSDC.
4. To develop a model of service delivery that had the potential for application to schools with similar target groups.
The literacy sessions implemented in the program aimed to further develop student’s analytical thinking skills and raise an awareness of their own self worth, demonstrated through effective public speaking, oral presentation skills and the importance of their own general knowledge. The numeracy program focussed on the basic processes to build the confidence of students that had a negative attitude towards mathematics.
The mentor program was a central component of the teaching program and was designed for teachers and support staff at RDSC to acquire and consolidate the skills and strategies for working with the target group in a withdrawal situation. Throughout the project, the literacy aides were very responsive to new ideas and strategies and the students in turn return responded positively to the individual attention and support.
Overall, while there were some timetabling constraints inherent in the project that affected the delivery of the professional development program, it was evident that this model of delivery has wider applicability and potential for secondary school students. It was evident that the benefits of small group work helped to boost student confidence in their knowledge and skills. The program also gave students the opportunity to develop trusting relationships with adults, develop notions of themselves as learners and encouraging them to be risk-takers.
The New South Wales Primary Principals Association - NSW
The project’s primary purpose was to test the effectiveness of using voluntary reading tutors with Year 2-4 students who were deemed to be failing, or at risk of failing, in four schools in the St George District. The project tested the effectiveness of training volunteer using specific reading skills programs as well as working with small groups of children on elements of their guided reading program. The project demonstrated many positive outcomes for the teacher, student and community participants. These included:
- the valuable contribution of the adult volunteers as part of a school reading program demonstrated by the significant improvements in class-based standardised tests that were recorded for a number of ‘low-progress’ readers;
- the importance of regular small group/individual skills sessions to support low progress readers as demonstrated by the project’s results; and,
- demonstrated greater confidence in reading, a greater willingness to read and an increased enthusiasm toward selecting library books by students involved in the project.
In summary, the project demonstrated a systematic approach to the use of guided volunteers as a structured and purposeful element of a school’s reading programme. The project team developed Reading Volunteers website which offered a ‘kit’ of suggestions for schools interested in using parent volunteers more effectively to support low progress readers. It offers suggestions about new resources, ideas for training volunteers and the approaches used in the project schools. The website can be accessed at http://www.stgeorged.det.nsw.edu.au/readingvolunteers/ 
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For further information on any of the above projects, please contact schools web.