SMART (compensatory education)
SMART ( S tart M aking a R eader T oday) is a compensatory education program to help students who are having trouble learning to read and write.
target group
It is aimed at students in the first and second grades who come from socially disadvantaged homes and who have been identified by the teachers as weak readers. In many cases, children were also admitted who were not very weak readers, but only slightly below average, but whose parents asked for their children to be included in the program.
Applications
SMART was developed in Oregon in 1992 . Today SMART reaches around 11,000 students in 260 primary schools.
SMART is based on the work of volunteers, mostly college students, who work for a good cause for free. Materials such as books are financed through donations.
The volunteers read with the children, visit libraries and sometimes help with homework. Each child is given two books per month (the child can choose which ones they are). The interest in reading should be aroused.
successes
SMART proves to be partially successful. The SMART children were compared with children in a control group who came from similar social backgrounds:
- It was found that the children read better than children from comparable backgrounds who did not take part in the program.
- However, they had lower reading skills than the average of their peers.
- The Smart kids were in the 31st percentile for their reading skills ; H. 69% of the peers read better, the children in the control group were on the 19th percentile, i.e. H. 81% of their peers read better.
Web links
swell
- ^ Baker, Scott, Russell Gersten and Thomas Keating. When less may be more: A 2-year longitudinal evaluation of a volunteer tutoring program requiring minimal training. Reading Research Quarterly, Volume 35, Number 4; Oct-Dec. 2000.