App improves preschoolers' reading skills without teachers

It's easy enough to claim that your educational iPad app will improve kids' reading skills — thousands of apps already do. But it's another thing when a former U.S. assistant secretary of education signs on to the claim.
A recent small-scale trial by New York University researcher Susan B. Neuman, who served in the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, found that giving a group of preschoolers the chance to play for just 15 minutes a day on a popular app called Learn with Homer (www.learnwithhomer.com) improved their reading skills 74% in a six-week summer period — without the help of a teacher.
By the end of the summer sessions, the 95 low-income students in federally-funded Head Start classrooms in Brooklyn outpaced their peers on several key reading skills, including so-called "phonological awareness," the ability to recognize what makes up oral language and to be able to play with it — recognizing, for instance, that two words begin or end with the same sound.
Learning the skill, Neuman says, "is not fun," so making a game of it gives a kid a huge advantage especially if he's struggling to learn to read.
What's more, she says, preschool teachers don't always speak clearly enough to help young students make fine-grained distinctions between letter sounds — a teacher with a thick southern accent, for instance, might pronounce the word "pen" as "pin."
Six weeks on the app also resulted in what Neuman calls "significant differences" in children's abilities to recognize letter sounds and realize that the shapes on a page match up with actual spoken words. Most of the kids in the trial knew their letters, but didn't necessarily know what sound they made. That connection is a key skill that kids must learn by the time they're in school.
"If we can do something there, we can say that we're really enabling these children to be more on target than they would otherwise be," Neuman says.
Going into the trials, Neuman wasn't really that interested in apps, but she says the results have persuaded her to look more closely at them for future research. "I'm now convinced that there are certain skills that can be taught – and taught more efficiently — through technology," she says.