An evaluation of Headsprout early reading as an online parent‐mediated intervention for primary school children
Headsprout Early Reading at home needs active parent coaching—without it, kids finish lessons but reading scores stay flat.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Gillespie et al. (2023) asked parents to run the Headsprout Early Reading lessons at home. Kids logged in while parents watched.
Half the families started right away. The other half waited. Researchers then compared lesson completion and reading scores.
What they found
More kids finished the lessons when parents were involved, but reading scores barely moved. After the wait, both groups looked the same.
The gain was so small it missed the cut-off for 'significant.'
How this fits with other research
Nally et al. (2021) got bigger reading gains with the same HER program. The difference: they gave parents short BST lessons and a weekly Zoom check-in. Extra coaching turned the same software into a stronger tool.
Storey et al. (2020) saw even larger gains when kids used HER in the school computer lab. School staff, not parents, ran the sessions. The move from lab to living room cut the payoff.
Bailey et al. (2022) tried another online reading program with autistic children and saw no gains at all. That null result lines up with the weak findings here: online literacy tools stall without strong adult support.
Why it matters
Sending parents a login link is not enough. If you want Headsprout to work at home, build in brief training and live check-ins. Add a five-minute BST session on praise and error correction. Schedule a weekly two-minute call. Those small extras are what separate 'lesson completed' from 'skill learned.'
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractDue to the Coronavirus pandemic and lengthy absences from the classroom, there is a need for large‐scale remedial programs to support young children to “catch‐up” on literacy and numeracy skills. A stratified randomized controlled trial was used to evaluate the Headsprout Early Reading (HER) program as a parent‐mediated digital literacy intervention. A between‐groups design compared differences in reading‐dependent outcome measures for 36 children assigned to one of three intervention groups: with support, without support, and waitlist‐control. Children completed significantly more episodes when parents received implementation support from the researcher compared to the without support group. Children receiving Headsprout instructions demonstrated marginally greater gains than the waitlist‐control group in posttest outcome measures; however, differences in reading outcomes were not significant between groups at posttesting. The current research provides tentative support for HER and importantly, highlights the importance of providing support for parents implementing interventions at home.
Behavioral Interventions, 2023 · doi:10.1002/bin.1955