We’re off and running and in our second week of Fast ForWord. Billed as a “neuroscience approach to reading intervention” this little piece of software (with a hefty price tag) is based on brain plasticity. You know about brain plasticity…the discovery that the brain grows and changes throughout our whole lifetime, instead of reaching it’s full growth in early childhood, which was thought to be true until just about a decade ago.

Well about a decade ago, Scientific Learning Corp. began exploiting this knowledge to develop a way to “fix” the brain’s ability to connect written word and oral language to help those who struggle with reading and communication processing. This company has made very impressive progress in helping struggling readers to greatly improve their reading, language and cognitive abilities. And they’ve done it in the research-based way that educators and school systems need to be able to justify the use of Fast ForWord products in their systems.

Their website is filled with studies done on various school populations throughout the country (and internationally). The programs raise reading test scores, improve performance on speech and language evaluations, and affect state-wide assessments. One study of particular interest to me was a private school in NY that utilized Fast ForWord for their emotionally disordered middle and secondary students, who made gains of an average of 2 years, 7 months on their receptive and expressive language skills.

Children with dyslexia, auditory processing and those learning the English language for the first time are all populations greatly helped by this intervention. The company claims a 90% success rate – meaning that 90% of the children who use this intervention see improvements. Wow! We’ve tried a lot of interventions with LuLu and many have helped. But none have been able to claim a 90% success rate.

Fast ForWord for Language uses the acronym MAPS to describe the areas it improves:

Improves memory by having the student hold a statement or question in working memory while retrieving picture-concept associations from long-term memory.

Improves attention by developing the ability to focus on tasks and ignore distractions.

Strengthens processing skills so that students can see images and distinguish sounds quickly enough to discriminate their difference.

Develops sequencing skills through exercises that require the use of word order to comprehend sentences and help identify missing parts.

So, what is Fast ForWord like? It’s a series of computer games focused on phoneme identification, working memory and processing speed. The child plays these games for either 50 minutes a day or 100 minutes a day. It is pre-programmed into the protocol which games a child plays on a given day and how long each game is – with the total being 50 or 100 minutes. Once a game is started, it can not be stopped, but breaks between the games are highly recommended.

Continued...

Photo Credit