The Need

As the integration of technology in the classroom increases, students are exposed to technology earlier in their academic careers. While math and science courses have adopted technology to educate students, literary curricula, particularly those developed for early-childhood classes, lack electronically-based solutions for education. There is a need for an app-based approach that teaches language and literacy for young students.

The Technology

Researchers led by Laura Justice through Ohio State's Crane Center for Childhood Research and Policy have developed a mobile application version of the widely used Read It Again-PreK! preschool language and literacy curriculum. Read It Again-PreK! is a practitioner-friendly, research-based curricular supplement that was designed to develop and strengthen young children's early foundations in language and literacy. Its lessons are organized around adult-child readings of high-quality storybooks and supplement, but not replace, an educator’s instruction. The curriculum was developed through a two-year collaborative effort, in which Crane Center for Early Childhood researchers worked closely with early childhood educators, state-level policy-makers, and speech-language pathologists. The app includes helpful features, such as an assessment tool that, after being completed for each student, can provide proper engagement techniques to the teacher for each student during lessons. The mobile application developed for Read It Again-PreK! has been developed to make the curriculum more accessible, more robust, and easier to distribute.

Commercial Applications

• Early childhood education (pre-K) curricular supplement

Benefits/Advantages

• Electronically-based
• Easy to use implementation
• Findings show that children in classrooms using the Read It Again-PreK! curricular supplement outperformed children in comparison classrooms in grammar, vocabulary, print knowledge and rhyming skills