Fast ForWord
| Public | |
| Industry | Educational software |
| Founded | California, U.S (1997) |
| Headquarters | Oakland |
|
Key people
|
Bill Jenkins Paula Tallal Steven Miller |
| Website | Homepage |
Fast ForWord is a family of educational software products intended to enhance cognitive skills of children, especially focused on developing "phonological awareness" (discussed below). It is marketed as a therapy for strengthening the skills of memory, attention, processing rate, and sequencing for children. It evolved from studies that showed children with abnormal temporal processing and language learning impairment could have their phonological awareness improved in parallel with their temporal processing. It is currently marketed for children with a broad range of reading problems, and perhaps other cognitive disorders as well. Fast ForWord software was developed and is commercially distributed by Scientific Learning Corporation, which became a public company in 1999.
Independent scientific analysis of the Fast ForWord product has shown some support for the effectiveness of the product in treating children's learning challenges. See Independent Scientific Analysis (further below).
The Fast ForWord products evolved from the work of a number of scientists, including Michael Merzenich and Bill Jenkins at the University of California, San Francisco, and Paula Tallal and Steven Miller at Rutgers University. This team started Scientific Learning shortly after publishing two papers in Science. These papers demonstrated that children who had abnormal temporal processing could be trained on software (which later evolved into Fast ForWord). This training results in 1–2 years of age equivalent improvement in language reception measures. The magnitude of the improvement, subject by subject, was correlated with their improvement in temporal processing. In other words, these studies showed that software like Fast ForWord, when applied to subjects with abnormally poor temporal processing and reading skills, could remediate both their temporal processing and language reception powerfully, and further suggest that temporal processing abnormalities can form a perceptual bottleneck in learning to comprehend language. The studies also included control groups and found significant differences in language reception improvements between control and experimental groups.
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