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Early Childhood Education
Overview1
Program description2
Ready, Set, Leap!® is a preschool curriculum that focuses on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and letter–sound correspondence, using multisensory technology that incorporates touch, sight, and sound. Teachers may adopt either a theme-based or a literature-based teaching approach, and for each approach, the curriculum provides lesson plans, learning objectives, and assessment tools.
Research
Two studies of Ready, Set, Leap!® meet the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards.3 The two studies included 540 preschool children enrolled in 38 preschools in New Jersey.4
Based on these two studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Ready, Set, Leap!® to be medium to large for oral language, print knowledge, and phonological processing, and small for early reading/writing and math. No studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations examined the effectiveness of Ready, Set, Leap!® in the cognition domain.
Effectiveness
Ready, Set, Leap!® was found to have no discernible effects on oral language, print knowledge, phonological processing, early reading/writing skills, and math.
| Oral Language | Print knowledge | Phonological processing | Early reading/ writing |
Cogni- tion |
Math | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | No discernible effects | No discernible effects | No discernible effects | No discernible effects | na | No discernible effects |
| Improvement index5 |
Average: +1 percentile points |
Average: +2 percentile points |
Average: +2 percentile points |
Average: +3 percentile points |
na | Average: |
| Range: –4 to +6 percentile points | Range: –3 to +8 percentile points | Range: –4 to +11 percentile points | Range: –9 to +3 percentile points | |||
| na = not applicable | ||||||
2 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly-available source: the program’s website (www.leapfrogschoolhouse.com, downloaded July 2008). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
3 To be eligible for the WWC’s review, the Early Childhood Education (ECE) intervention had to be implemented in English in center-based settings with children aged three years to five years, or in preschool.
4 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
5 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.
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|Institute of Education Sciences