Closing the App Gap: Improving Children’s Phonological Skills

The purpose of our study was to examine the efficacy of Learn with Homer, an application designed to improve school readiness skills on children’s early literacy development.

Specifically, the trial focused on children’s speech-to-print development, recognizing that the skills of phonological awareness and the understanding of the alphabetic principle are strongly predictive of school readiness. Our goal was to better understand how a carefully targeted application, with an evidence-based instructional design, could help to improve children’s skills and potentially close the gap for low-income children. Given what is known about the ‘summer slide,’ for poor children in particular, providing phonological awareness in a highly motivating program might be especially critical, given the significant differences in children’s early language skills as they enter kindergarten, right ‘at the starting gate.’ This study indicated measurable effects for children’s growth in phonological awareness and in developing an understanding of the speech-to-print connections in early literacy development. Children in the treatment group exceeded those in the control group in three areas in particular: print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter sounds. For the treatment group specifically, children made statistically significant gains in all skills measured, with the exception of the identification of the alphabet’s upper case letters. These results indicate that Learn with Homer significantly improved children’s school readiness skills.