A New Approach to Reading Intervention & Literacy Development

Help kids who strugёŀд felк bėhīnd can't caтЩ up to get back on track.

The need for powerful, efficient reading intervention has never been greater, with the Covid shutdowns significantly widening the gap between high and low-performing students. TIPS™ has a unique role to play in this environment, enabling teachers to rapidly teach a student the tools they need to decode every single word they see. With TIPS™, your students will learn how to teach themselves to read.

CONSISTENT RULES

TIPS™ is deeply logical and linear, in a way that traditional English literacy programs are not. There are no exceptions, no tricky words, and no complex rules.

RESEARCH DRIVEN

In the last ten years, the science of reading has advanced beyond phonics vs. whole-language. The key driver of early literacy is English itself, not just how you teach it.

STICKY PROGRESS

As students master TIPS™, they naturally, implicitly, build foundational reading skills. This enables "self teaching", which leads to steady progress that doesn't regress.

Opportunity for All

TIPS™ makes learning to read much, much, easier

TIPS™ reduces the cognitive load required for students to decode successfully, by embedding clear, consistent guides to mark every sound made by every letter in every word. This frees up mental energy to focus on higher order reading skills like comprehension and fluency.

Joy in Reading

Students decode fearlessly with constant success

Every encounter with English in TIPS™ is clear. Students learn that they can tackle decoding of any material presented to them. This builds tremendous confidence and capability in early readers. The markings enable students to decode on their own. Through the process of repeated decoding they develop sight-word mastery of high-frequency words naturally.

Rich Library

TIPS™ unlocks tens of thousands of words in a few weeks of study

TIPS™ is organized into a series of Reading Levels, each introducing different letter-sound combinations based on their frequency of use in English.

This allows us to create leveled readers in the system and include meaningful content for students, even those at the very beginning of their reading journey.

Case Study

Rapid Progress Reading with TIPS™

In the Fall of 2020, pilot data was collected from our early adopters. The results point to the clear potential of TIPS™ as a transformational alternative to traditional reading intervention strategies:

Study Overview: 6 weeks intervention, 7 teachers, 36 students. Mix of digital and in-person settings.
21% of students experienced “light-speed” performance gains. Many high-potential students are simply held back by the complexity of typical English instruction.
Students showed significant improvement across every aspect of early literacy development measured.
Assessments measured progress with traditional text, demonstrating immediate transfer to “regular” reading.

Research Foundations

TIPS™ is built on profound science of reading.

There is perfect clarity and research consensus that English stands alone in its complexity. Our spelling system did not preserve the link between letters and sounds, making learning to read in English uniquely challenging.

English is a true outlier when it comes to letter-sound correspondence (Share, 2008)
Word reading accuracy in more transparent orthographies reaches 95% or more at the end of first grade… compared to just 34% in English, an effect attributable to the complexity of the language (Seymour, Aro, Erskine, 2003)
The challenges presented by orthographic complexity and the indecipherability of English fall disproportionately on the students of lowest ability (Spencer & Hanley, 2003).
In transparent orthography nations, readers with delayed reading-accuracy are few and respond very effectively to reading-accuracy remediation (Cossu, 1999; Schneider, Ennemoser, Roth, & Kuspert, 1999).
Transparent-orthography reading-accuracy development has few prerequisites (Lyytinen et al., 2004; Poskiparta et al., 1999)
Annotation of vowel sounds yields a significant, dose-response benefits to decoding accuracy and passage reading accuracy… and enhanced the effect of practice. (Donnelly, Gijbels, Larson, Matskewich, Linnerud, Kuhl & Yeatman, 2020)