Smart Tutor’s differentiated instruction automatically assesses and provides instruction that matches each student’s profile and learning ability. Learning Today’s pedagogy of “Tutorial, Practice, and Assessment” ensures that students learn in an engaging, encouraging, motivating, challenging and non-threatening learning environment.
By providing focused time on task and explicit instruction, “At Risk” students begin to increase their intrinsic motivation to learn. This opens the gateway to learning and enables Learning Today to help them develop the essential reading and math skills they need to become successful in school and on high-stakes tests.
Students feel successful as they never ‘get stuck’ and never visibly ‘fail’ as the program provides them helpful hints and immediate corrective feedback. Smart Tutor provides the student with the equivalent of an individual tutor, one that is engaging, encouraging, motivating, challenging, non-threatening, non-judgmental and capable of targeting specific deficiencies.
Differentiated Instruction
In differentiated classrooms, teaching begins where students are, not at the front of a curriculum guide. (Tomlinson,1995) They accept and build upon the premise that learners differ in important ways. Thus, they also accept and act on the premise that technology must be ready to engage students through different learning modalities, by appealing to differing interests, and by using varied rates of instruction along with varied degrees of complexity. In differentiated classrooms, teachers ensure that a student competes against himself as he grows and develops, more than he competes against other students. (Tomlinson, 1999) Learning Today’s Smart Tutor provides true differentiated instruction by first determining the student's reading and math profile, then delivering instruction to match the student’s profile and learning ability.
Multiple Learning Modalities
The Learning Today program appeals to struggling learners because it engages them through the use of all three learning modalities: visual, kinesthetic, and auditory.
Tactile, kinesthetic learners need to touch, move, and experience. Through the use of the keyboard, mouse, and virtual manipulatives, children are able to interact with the program. The use of high-end, colorful graphics and flash technology provides the visual stimulation that children of the 21st century have become accustomed to. The program meets the auditory learning styles of learners through the use of speech and sounds which are incorporated throughout each aspect of the program.
Instructional Approach
Each lesson is typically divided into three components: Tutorial, Practice & Skills Assessment with certain lessons containing more than one practice and skills assessments depending on the number of concepts covered in that lesson.
Tutorial: Students are introduced and taught the main concepts using a problem-solving approach and guided practice. Age-appropriate characters that reflect a broad range of ethnic diversity cover pre-requisites, introduce and model new skills and guide learners through the lesson. Students are constantly invited to practice problems step by step throughout the tutorial, and immediate corrective feedback is given for both correct and incorrect responses.
Practice: The practice activity provides an opportunity for students to review and practice what they have just learned. Depending on the level and the skills covered in the tutorial, students may be presented between three to ten problems. Problems are randomly generated from a bank of questions and students are given two tries to answer each problem. As in the tutorial, students are provided with immediate feedback and fun animations to reinforce correct responses.
Skills Assessment: The skills assessment component is similar to the practice activity with the only difference being that student performance is tracked, timed and recorded in the Learning Today Management System. If students fail to pass the lesson, the system will take students back to the tutorial and then they are brought back to the skills assessment. If a student fails the skills assessment a second time, the system moves the student on to a different lesson and the student is listed on an intervention report.
Enabling Technology
Smart Tutor is built from native web technology and utilizes advanced caching techniques that allow for smooth uninterrupted service. It is simple to implement and extremely cost-effective to install and maintain. The fully automated system requires little to no teacher intervention – students receive their individualized learning programs by simply clicking on an icon!
Harnessing native web technology, Smart Tutor has been created using an ASP Model combined with a Microsoft database and operating system. The learning management application is cross-platform compatible – i.e. it will work on either PC's or Macs and will run on any browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape or Safari.
Unlike the older LAN-based systems, Learning Today’s curriculum and applications were built from native web technology allowing implementation in minutes versus days or weeks.
- Proprietary Streaming Technology
- Extremely Cost Effective to Install and Maintain
- System is Fully Automated – runs with little or no teacher intervention
