There’s a lot to be excited about when a new school year is beginning, and this year is a big one for Foundations in Learning! We’re kicking off 2019-20 by launching the Foundations Learning System, an integrated assessment and intervention solution designed for students who struggle with reading comprehension and fluency due to poor word recognition skills.

If you’re already familiar with our screener, iASK diagnostic, and/or Access Code intervention, you’ll find that the same research basis and proven techniques are present in our new system. We’ve aligned each of these elements into the new integrated system to ensure that educators have all the elements needed to support students’ development of foundational reading skills.

In short, the name of our product has changed, but our focus on supporting struggling readers remains steadfast.

The Foundations Learning System takes a blended approach to teaching and learning and is comprised of five components:

• A 20-minute online screener to quickly identify whether students have deficits in automatic word recognition skills.
• An online diagnostic to identify specific gaps in decoding knowledge and measure automaticity of word recognition. It typically takes three 20-minute sessions to complete and is the only scaled measure of automatic word recognition currently available.
• An online intervention with 24 units organized into six clearly defined objectives. The intervention personalizes instruction based on the principles 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.
• Curriculum guides for teachers so they can extend, reinforce and deepen the learning provided through the online instruction.
• Reports that enable teachers and administrators to monitor student performance as the student progresses through the System.

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 proficiency in reading, and at least one-half of these students lack adequate basic word recognition skills. This means, on average, there are nine to ten students in many classrooms who are “stuck” – whose learning has stagnated, and who are unable to make progress. Since traditional instruction does not address how these students learn, they fall further and further behind with each passing day, often becoming invisible.

The Foundations Learning System is the solution your struggling readers need. It is built on 10 years of research and product development and 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.

Contact us to learn more about the launch of the Foundations Learning System.