The QuickSmart Program: Allowing Students to Undertake Higher-Order Mental Processing by Providing a Learning Environment to Improve Their Information Retrieval Times

Abstract

Students who have problems with learning face a myriad of difficulties in accessing the curriculum in today's classrooms. These students often need intensive support to bring them 'up to speed' in basic skills such as reading fluency and the recall of number facts. Catering to the educational needs of these students poses a considerable challenge to classroom teachers. The research described here focuses on the role of automaticity in developing students' fluency and facility with basic academic facts. The program is described as a fourth-phase intervention. This follows the initial teaching of the content by the classroom teacher and subsequent attempts to address students' difficulties. The third phase occurs when the teacher receives collaborative support from a specialist within the classroom. The fourth phase refers to intensive focused instruction associated with the student being withdrawn from class for a number of periods a week over an extended time frame. The main aim of the QuickSmart research program is to investigate the effect of improved automaticity of basic skills on higher-order processes, such as problem solving and comprehension. One significant feature of the QuickSmart intervention is that it is directed towards students in their middle years of schooling where there has traditionally been a dearth of focused and intensive support available. The research program, conducted by University of New England's Dr Lorraine Graham and Professor John Pegg, and special education teachers, Ms Anne Bellert and Ms Jenny Thomas, has focused on students with learning difficulties in their middle years of schooling. Dubbed QuickSmart because quick in response speed and smart in strategy use is NN, hat the program encourages students to become, the initiative was funded during 2001 by federal Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) under its Innovative Programs in Literacy and Numeracy scheme and is currently supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grant (2003-2005).