Brainchild Academy Concept Employs Multimodal, Data-driven Instruction for Struggling Students

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With 24-30 students or more in the typical classroom, it is tough for teachers to give students individual attention, especially struggling students. Brainchild (www.brainchild.com)—an educational publisher of assessment and intervention programs— today launched the Brainchild Academy Concept, which combines its technology resources with direct teacher observation into a three-station instructional plan.

“We have found that the Academy Concept is extremely successful in classrooms because students are using multiple modalities to learn the same content and teachers can focus on small groups of students”

The Brainchild Academy Concept is a multimodal method of combining print and digital resources with face-to-face instruction. Students work through three stations: 1) Brainchild Achiever! for diagnosis and assessment, 2) Brainchild’s hand-held Study Buddy for instruction and 3) use of Achiever! worksheets or supplemental print materials for reinforcing instruction with a teacher or tutor. This three-station method keeps a classroom of students continually occupied and focused on the core instructional content while the teacher is free to assist and guide her students through the process.

“We have found that the Academy Concept is extremely successful in classrooms because students are using multiple modalities to learn the same content and teachers can focus on small groups of students,” said Jeff Cameron, founder and president of Brainchild. “Repetition is the key and when students rotate between computers, cooperative learning and face-to-face instruction, you see great results.”

Centro Campesino ( www.brainchild.com/Pdfs/CentroCaseStudy.pdf ) in Florida uses the Academy Concept to help their students who are from families of migrant farmworkers. At Centro Campesino, students are first assessed using Achiever! which detects student strengths and weaknesses on FCAT standards and then ties into tutorials that are tied directly into the assessment. Next, students go to a station with Study Buddies, which are Brainchild’s hand-held learning devices that can be used cooperatively or in self-study mode. The Study Buddy content mirrors the tutorials from Achiever! but as a hand-held, allows students to work in teams and have more freedom with the device.

At the final station, students in the Academy solve problems on worksheets printed out from Achiever! or any other supplemental print materials that are standards-aligned. In this way, they are practicing the concepts from the previous two stations and engaging with the content in a new way with the help of their teacher or tutor.

The Academy Concept will be featured at the Brainchild booth number 323 at the 2010 Florida Educational Technology Conference in Orlando, Florida which runs from January 12-15.

About Brainchild

Brainchild, Corp. is a Florida-based company that provides standards-based online assessment, instruction and reporting tools that help students reach and exceed learning objectives. In addition to its Achiever! series built individually for each state, Brainchild manufactures the Study Buddy, the first handheld tutor that was created exclusively for K-12 public schools and is being used by over 1 million students per day. Call, click or email: 800-811-2724, www.brainchild.com or [e-mail].