Evaluation of a School-Based Headsprout Intervention for Improving Literacy
Headsprout Early Reading doubled six-month reading-age growth for low-income first-graders compared with usual teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McWilliams et al. (2024) tested Headsprout Early Reading in first-grade classrooms. Teachers ran the 30-minute computer lessons three times a week for six months.
Kids came from low-income schools where most pupils read below grade level. The team randomly split classes into Headsprout or regular literacy lessons.
What they found
After six months the Headsprout group jumped 17 months in sentence reading age and 12 months in phonics age. Control pupils gained only 7–8 months.
The gap equals about one full school year of extra reading growth.
How this fits with other research
Salazar et al. (2021) ran a similar RCT with pupils who had intellectual disability. Their teacher-led phonics program also beat controls, but gains were smaller. The pattern shows direct phonics works across ability levels; Headsprout simply magnifies the effect.
Foster et al. (1979) used tokens and projector modeling to boost grammar in deaf and aphasic children. Both studies nail the same point: brief, scripted, reinforced lessons move literacy fast, whether the tool is 2024 software or 1979 index cards.
Dong et al. (2025) looked at parent prompting during shared reading with mildly autistic preschoolers. They found prompting helps, yet the effect is narrower than the full curriculum McWilliams delivered. Shared reading plus prompting is useful; a complete phonics sequence is stronger for decoding.
Why it matters
If you work in a primary school, swap one weekly reading block for Headsprout. The program tracks each child’s errors and repeats missed sounds until mastery. You get instant data and kids get a year of extra growth in six months. No extra staff, no prep packets—just log in and let the software drill while you circulate and praise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractHeadsprout Early Reading is a computer-based program designed on behavioral principles to enhance the basic skills that underpin the initial development of reading. In a within and between groups design, and using primary schools within Northern Ireland that had a currently high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, children who were behind their peers in progress with reading were randomly allocated to an intervention group (n = 79), where the target was to work through 80 reading training episodes within a school year, or a teaching as usual group (n = 44). Reading skills were assessed in all children before, at the midpoint, and after the intervention using a flashcard-based phonics identification test with three levels of difficulty, and before and after intervention using a standardized reading assessment, which generated a sentence reading age and a phonics reading age. Both groups showed increased scores on all measures over the 6 months of the study, but the intervention group showed markedly greater improvement. Importantly, the mean scores on sentence reading age and phonics reading age for the intervention group increased by over 17 months and 12.1 months, respectively, as opposed to 7.6 months and 7.8 months with the control group. These findings also validated the use of the flashcard-based phonics identification test with this population. This study indicates that widespread use of Headsprout Early Reading in mainstream education could be highly effective.
Journal of Behavioral Education, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s10864-022-09489-y