Week 14 Response

I thought Nichole Pinkard's study on Rappin' Reader and Say Say Oh Playmate was really interesting, not only because of the culturally responsive aspect to the programs, but also because of the way the programs were designed around specific theories of learning to read. For instance, because word repetition is essential to learning new words, the fact that Rappin' Reader used repetitive lyrics makes perfect sense. It seems like this is a kind of "drill and kill" software in which the repetitive drills are actually grounded in what we know about how our brains process and learn language. This made me think back to our discussions about drill and practice software for math education, and made me wonder whether math software is grounded in the same kind of knowledge -- how are brains understand math. I also liked that these were tested in after school programs in order to consider whether kids would really choose to play with the programs when other activities are offered. Since we know that student interest and motivation is a key piece to student learning, this aspect to the study seemed to me to be a really good way to gauge real student interest.