Many readers of this blog know about our school’s project of providing home computers and DSL service to immigrant families, who then use it to study English.  You can find links to several articles about it on sidebar.

We just tabulated the results from the first quarter assessments we did, and the results are very positive.

The first year we did this students from fifteen families had almost double the improvement in their cloze scores (that tend to evaluate vocabulary and comprehension) than those who did not have home computers.  This new group of students from thirty families with home computers and the thirty in the control group had exactly the same difference –students from the thirty families with home computers had almost double the improvement in their cloze scores than those without home computers.

The real shocker was in their reading fluency scores — the number of words read in a minute (with errors subtracted).  Last year there was no difference between the two groups.  This time around the students with home computers had exactly triple the improvement in reading fluency than those without the home computers.

Of course, these are just the results from the first quarter assessment, so we have to see if it continues during the rest of the year.  But it does look positive.