QuickSmart Literacy Resources and Organisation Manual

Abstract

Middle school students who have problems with learning face many difficulties at school. These students often need intensive support to narrow the gap between them and their peers in basic skills such as word recognition, decoding, vocabulary knowledge, fluency and comprehension. The QuickSmart Literacy Program is an educational intervention designed to support literacy skill development. The program was developed by a research team at the University of New England through the National Centre of Science, Information and Communication Technology, and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia. QuickSmart focuses on the role of automaticity in learning. Automaticity is the immediate recall of basic information. The program is called QuickSmart to encourage students to become quick in their response speed and smart in their strategy use when learning the basic skills required in literacy. Ultimately, QuickSmart aims to free up the working memory of students so that they can engage meaningfully in school activities that require comprehension of text. It is particularly important that middle school students have ready access to the basic skills that enable them to fully engage with challenging academic work. The QuickSmart Literacy Program provides instruction that is planned to meet individual student learning needs. The program follows a structured lesson sequence based around a "focus set" of words and related text. Teaching and learning strategies used include explicit strategy instruction, modelling, discussion, repeated reading, and deliberate practice. It incorporates the Cognitive Aptitude Assessment System (OZCAAS) computer assessment tool that provides information about each student's accuracy and speed of recalling words, and reading for meaning. Students aim to increase their accuracy and decrease response times as a means of demonstrating increasing automaticity. ... In summary, the QuickSmart Literacy Program is a theory-based instructional intervention designed to improve students' information retrieval times to levels that free up working memory capacity from an excessive focus on word decoding and recall. Becoming faster and more confident in basic skills means that students have more time, energy and attention available for tackling the more challenging tasks of reading and comprehending increasingly difficult text.