Geoffrey Borman and colleagues conducted an evaluation of the popular Fast ForWord™ program, and they reported that, “The Fast ForWord Language program did not, in general, help students in these eight schools improve their language and reading comprehension outcomes.”
This is a well-conceived and conducted evaluation. There are multiple schools with many children at different age levels, and the researchers used sophisticated methods. Still, the results must be discouraging to many folks.
From the beginning, the implementation of the program and the level of support from within the school system and from the program developers, Scientific Learning Corporation, were exemplary. Site visits, observations of the training, communications with the Scientific Learning Corporation, and communications with the teachers and principals implementing Fast ForWord revealed a consistent level of commitment and support across district leadership, school-level leaders, the schools’ teaching staffs, and representatives from Scientific Learning Corporation. Nevertheless, impact analyses of assignment to the Fast ForWord program revealed few encouraging signs of academic benefits approaching those claimed by the program’s developers. In this way, the results raise several questions regarding the potential and the appropriateness of Fast ForWord for improving reading and language outcomes for nonclinical “at-risk” student populations served in school-based settings.
In this study, as in at least one other independent evaluation of the program, there was concern with whether some of the students completed enough of the Fast ForWord™ program to have it affect their competence. Compliance with the program at a level that provides a full dose would be something that schools clearly would have to secure; otherwise, as this study and others show, the Fast ForWord Language program probably will not result in better outcomes, and it may be that even with such compliance, one shouldn’t expect much.
Borman et al. reported their findings in Educatioal Evaluation and Policy Analysis online in December 2008 and in print 2009. The abstract is available here, and this is the full citation:
Borman, G. D., Benson, J. G., & Overman, L. (2009). A randomized field trial of the Fast ForWord language computer-based training program. Educatioal Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31, 82.
For reports from the developer about the effectiveness of Fast ForWord, see the Scientific Learning Corporation Web site. See earlier posts on TE regarding Fast ForWord.
Despite the negative view of the report, we respect Mr. Borman and his colleagues, and we were quite pleased to see the blogger’s comment about implementation fidelity. Specifically, ‘Compliance with the program at a level that provides a full dose would be something that schools clearly would have to secure…’”
It is important that readers note the “Intent-to-Treat” design of the study included students who were intended for the intervention but did not participate in the implementation. Following analyses of the “Intent to Treat” model the authors concluded that, the “results also raise questions about the viability of scheduling and implementing the demanding training schedule of 90–100 minutes per day, five times per week in an urban school setting…as the positive achievement results for those seventh graders with better Fast ForWord participation rates suggest, only a high level of day-to-day perseverance by teachers and students is likely to pay dividends in improved literacy outcomes.”
On page 99 the authors also note, “However, supplementary analyses, which examined the causal effects of participation, revealed that when the middle school teachers and students remained committed and more faithfully achieved the participation standards set by Scientific Learning Corporation, the students exhibited statistically significant improvements in reading comprehension.”
In the 9 years since this specific research was conducted, Fast ForWord products now include alternate 30 and 50 minute per day protocols, compliance scores for students and groups, and automated intervention flags to help schools monitor and achieve the recommended implementation fidelity. As could be anticipated, the past two years have shown wide use of the 30 and 50 minute protocols in comparison to the 90-100 minute protocols of almost a decade ago. On average, students now complete our products faster, more effectively and with more reliable achievement outcomes. There are numerous independent reviews and research studies on Fast ForWord that found the product to be effective in raising literacy outcomes – some are listed below for readers’ convenience:
Additional and Subsequent Implementations and Published Studies Supporting the Efficacy of Fast ForWord:
Temple E., Deutsch GK, Poldrack RA, Miller SL, Tallal P, Merzenich MM, Gabrieli JDE. (2003) Neural deficits in children with dyslexia ameliorated by behavioral remediation: evidence from functional MRI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100 (5):2860-2865.
Stevens, C., Fanning, J., Coch, D., Sanders, L., & H Neville (2008). Neural mechanisms of selective auditory attention are enhanced by computerized training: Electrophysiological evidence from language-impaired and typically developing children. Brain Research, 1205, 55-69.
Gaab, N., Gabrieli, J.D.E., Deutsch, G.K., Tallal, P., & Temple, E. (2007). Neural correlates of rapid auditory processing are disrupted in children with developmental dyslexia and ameliorated with training: An fMRI study. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 25, 295-310
Steve, thanks for dropping a comment. It’s nice to have someone from SciLearn among the readers, especially when you didn’t adopt the strategy that some corporate folks seem to favor: Cut and paste a press release into the comments.
Your point about dose-response considerations is very important, in my view. The importance is heightened in areas where there may be a tipping point. By that I mean that learners might make minimal progress until an as-yet-unknown skill level is reached, at which point facility with the skill increases rapidly. I suspect (don’t have the experimental evidence to show, though) that some of these quasi-cognitive skills are subject to this phenomenon. In my clinical experience (and it’s only that), I’ve seen some remedial students go from struggling for weeks to read 20 nonsense words correct per minute to reading nearly double that number in just a few days.
The concept is analogous to the idea of developmental disequilibrium. It’s also connected to LaBerge and Samuels’ concept of automaticity. If y’all could relate entering child characteristics to the number of practice trails needed before that sort of phenomenon happens, that’d be something, no? Of course, first you’d need to show that it does, in fact, happen.
We are a private provider of Fast ForWord using a motivational learning center approach. We get better results than these studies because we have 90% compliance on average vs 60-65% in these studies. It amazes me SLC gets any gains at school with this level of compliance as we don’t do well at that level.
Also, our results vary which of course makes sense given that every child is different. The problem with studies like this is that ‘average gains” miss that some children have their lives changed AND we often hear our most dramatic changes a year later which these studies (for good scientific reasons) do not capture at all.
Having provided Fast ForWord to 350 kids or so in the last three years I am so over the does-this-work question. Not only does it work for kids with CAPD and/or reading issues, we are forever expanding who we agree to try it with and are constantly being surprised by its power to change brain wiring.
Excellent blog, quite informative and resource for your readers ……..