Successmaker the Effectiveness of Successmaker

¶ … Successmaker

The Effectiveness of Successmaker in an Elementary Setting to raise Reading Test Scores

According to reports by the National Reading Panel (2000) and the U.S. Department of Education (2001), more than eight million American students in Grades 4 to 12 are not fluent readers. A report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2007) further highlights the deficiencies in national literacy by documenting that amongst fourth graders nationally, 33% are reading below basic level. It is clear from these statistics that reading proficiency is a highly relevant issue in the American education system. I chose the topic because it has strong implications on the literacy problem. The Successmaker provides a learning method that may be more effective than traditional teaching approaches. The prospect of finding corroborative evidence also contributed strongly to my decision to research this topic.

Research Questions/Hypotheses

Does the Successmaker Reading Program substantially improve students' reading scores on standardized tests?

2. How does the teaching method employed by Successmaker differ from traditional methods and what effect does it have on the students?

3. Do the reading skills learned on Successmaker's multimedia platform translate back onto paper? Specifically, does Successmaker's multimedia approach detract from the actual act of reading?

I chose these research questions specifically for what I perceived to be the most fundamental questions concerning the effectiveness of the Successmaker Reading Program. Question one is required to assess the primary research objective, which is to measure the effectiveness of the reading program on the single impact outcome measure -- reading scores. In terms of implementation, it is necessary to understand the teaching approach employed by the Successmaker Program. Research question two addresses this issue. It would be important to assess the motivational stimulus that such interactive reading programs have on the students (Underwood, 2000). This aspect leads into the third research question, which attempts to ascertain what specific role the multimedia component has on the student's learning ability. It is important to determine whether students' have the same motivations and learning ability when the lesson is removed from the multimedia framework. In the end, the student must be able to apply the lessons to reading a book. I researched the existing literature for gaps in knowledge to formulate these research questions. While claims for the educational benefits of Successmaker are positive, they remain largely untested. I looked for relevant articles on PubMed and Medline for background knowledge on past studies and structured my research questions in a way that I felt would produce plain evidence for the effectiveness of the Successmaker Reading Program.

Difficulties encountered in formulating these research questions included conflicting background information. Some studies claimed that Successmaker was highly effective while others showed little difference in success outcomes when compared to traditional teaching approaches. A lack in recent studies on the Successmaker Reading Program also complicated the formulation of relevant research questions because it was unclear whether the assumptions and results from studies performed ten years ago still apply in today's media-centered environment. Another complication arose from going through the imaginative process of how to objectively test each of these research questions and the possibility of obtaining clear and precise answers to the questions.