Research to Improve Early Literacy Acquisition with TIPS™

New science is written every day.

TIPS™ is an innovative approach to teaching English literacy. We are currently conducting research in numerous areas to further prove efficacy at scale.

IES Transformative Research Proposal

TinyIvy has partnered with the Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education (“CRRE”), Stanford’s Educational Neuroscience Initiative (“Stanford”), and the Department of Education in New York City (NYC DOE), among others, to conduct research to explore and evaluate a fundamental transformation of the alphabet used to teach early literacy in America.

Existing Solutions Have Not Yielded Benefits at Scale

States Showing Improvement in 4th Grade Literacy, NAEP 2017 to 2019 Comparison

No research, pedagogy, curriculum, or program has proven a powerful, scalable, and cost-effective solution to alter the trajectory of our reading scores as a nation.

$3.5B in School Improvement Grants were deployed in 2010 and had no significant impact on reading outcomes (Dragoset, 2017).

Forty-nine states show flat or declining reading proficiency scores between 2017 and 2019.

Programs like Head Start have no significant effect on reading outcomes (Pages, 2020).

Technology adoption has no significant effect on reading outcomes (Neitzel et al.).

The Root Cause of Low Literacy is English Itself

It is our system of writing, not factors of intelligence and socioeconomic status, that lead the English language to require years of additional study to achieve competency (Seymour, Phillip, & Aro, 2003; Geva & Siegel, 2000; Geva, Wade-Woolley, & Shany, 1993).

While a solution to this challenge has yet to be confirmed through research, the challenge of English spelling itself is well understood to have an enormous impact on student’s ability to learn to read it.

English requires years of additional study to master vs. languages with more transparent orthographies.

TinyIvy Research Team & Approach

The research team will perform a series of five research projects. In Year 1, a qualitative pilot study across twenty schools will be conducted by CRRE while Stanford, will conduct the first of three focused experiments to better understand the fundamental mechanisms through which TinyIvy’s solution improves learning outcomes. In Year 2 and 3, a larger, 50 school research project led by CRRE will collect qualitative data on student performance, while two additional studies by Stanford will further refine our understanding of the ideal approach to teaching with this novel system and where it may best be utilized for greatest effect.

Join Our Research

We are currently recruiting schools to participate in Phase I of this research. If successful in securing the grant:

Schools will receive over $50,000 worth of technology, curriculum, materials, and professional development.
Program supports in-person, hybrid and remote teaching models.
Teachers participating in the research will receive an additional stipend each semester.
20 schools will be included in Phase I, 50 schools will be included in Phase II.