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'Last resort' learning intervention program gets more government support

June 22, 2006

Pegg.thumb.jpgResearchers at The University of New England have just received government funding of almost half a million dollars to extend a learning intervention program that has been helping under-achieving school students to “trust their heads”.

The program, called QuickSmart, enables poorly-performing students to abandon inefficient mental procedures and to try new, more efficient ones – “trusting their heads”, as the students themselves put it.

Acknowledged as a “last resort” intervention for middle-school students otherwise destined to fail, QuickSmart has enabled under-performing students in Years 5 to 8 to narrow the "performance gap" with their peers. One of the UNE researchers, Professor John Pegg, explained that the program aimed at “freeing up working memory” by encouraging the students to abandon slow and cumbersome processes such as the use of their fingers for counting.

“Under the program,” Professor Pegg explained, “a teacher or teacher’s aide works with two students at a time, in 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 30 weeks. They’re put into a motivational environment, encouraging them to think more quickly and accurately – hence ‘QuickSmart’. They start to want to get faster, and while the program focuses on numeracy skills, they improve in other areas as well.”

Professor Pegg (pictured here) is the Director of the National Centre of Science, ICT and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia (SiMERR); he and his SiMERR colleague, Dr Lorraine Graham, are the project’s Team Leaders.

QuickSmart, which began in 2001, has involved schools in the New England and North Coast regions of NSW, and in the Northern Territory. The program has achieved outstanding results, with students reporting significant gains that have been recognised by teachers and parents. The Australian Government is contributing $225,000 as a "quality teacher initiative" under its Quality Teacher Program for 2006, while the additional funding for this year is to come from the Northern Territory and NSW Governments.

There are 13 schools in the current project, involving more than 200 students. Twelve of the schools are in the Northern Territory – including two desert schools and one on Elco Island – and the other is Orara High School in Coffs Harbour. "In the Northern Territory there is a distinctly Indigenous and primary-school focus to the program," Dr Graham said, "involving about 10 students in each school. At Orara, a secondary school, we are experimenting with how to organise a program to support a large cohort of students in one school."

The UNE team – Professor Pegg, Dr Graham, and Jenny Thomas, the Project Manager – travelled to the Northern Territory in March to initiate this year’s extension of the program, and will return there in July and December. Professor Pegg said that there was a greater involvement of teacher’s aides this year. “Through their involvement, teacher’s aides are playing an enhanced role in the education of these students and are finding this new role very satisfying,” he said.

The results of the QuickSmart project will be a feature of an international education conference titled “Narrowing the Achievement Gap” to be held at UNE next April.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at June 22, 2006 04:39 PM