Secret Stories is research proven, meeting the highest standard of evidence under ESSA Tier I – Strong. This federal standard under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a key criteria for evaluating new products and solutions for districts and schools, particularly to obtain ESSER funding.
All studies were completed by a third party research firm and independently reviewed and verified by Learning Experience Design (LXD) Research as meeting the highest level of ESSA Evidence criteria.
The snapshots below provide only a brief overview of each study summary. To view the complete study summaries and “read more,” please click here.
Secret Stories® embedded mnemonic phonics posters featured in model classrooms highlighted in science of reading training videos (as referenced in Reading 360, Phonics First, LETRS trainers and other DPI/State Dept. of Ed. SOR training courses)
Understanding phonics means understanding the relationship between sounds and their spellings (Moats, 2014). It requires the reader to have an awareness of the Alphabetic Principle, which explains how the sounds of speech become associated with letters of the alphabet (Lyons & Ghetti, 2011). Understanding this relationship is critical because English represents individual units of sound (phonemes) with corresponding single letters and groups of letters (graphemes).
While phonics instruction teaches students about the relationship between letters and sounds, effective phonics instruction teaches students to associate sounds with the corresponding letters and letter patterns so that they learn to encode (write) and decode (read) words using the sound-symbol correspondence.
This is a strategy that all good readers demonstrate (Ehri, 2005). Mastery of the relationship between letters and sounds ‘unlocks’ the reading and writing code for early readers. Although there are a number of approaches to teaching phonics, not all are equally effective, nor do they make use of brain science.
When it comes to early reading instruction, the gap that exists between what we know and what we do is wide, particularly with regard to what we know about the brain and how we teach kids to read. Information on human nature should be the starting point for discussions on how to teach children to read and write. According to Dr. Timothy Shanahan (2017), most educators have been misguided on the ideas about the nature of reading and ultimately how to teach it effectively. All of the familiar techniques were devised before we had a scientific understanding of reading, and are based on theories that we now know are wrong.
Secret Stories® instruction is angled to support phonics skill transfer to reading and writing, providing the logical explanations for letter sound behavior that the learners’ brains crave. These logical explanations are shared in the form of “secret” stories, which are the secret reasons why letters make the sounds that they do when they come together in words. The more Secrets that beginning grade learners know, the more they are able to read and write.
The National Reading Panel identified five essential elements for reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary and fluency. These elements need to be taught to ensure all students gain the most from early reading instruction. The incontrovertible finding from the extensive body of local and international evidence-based reading research is that children during the early years of their education must first master the alphabetic code via systematic, explicit and intensive instruction in: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies. Of these elements, phonics is the area in which early readers are most deficient. Phonics is also the area in which brain based teaching methods are least likely to be employed.
Secret Stories® employs a “dual-track” approach to teaching reading that is both systematic and learner driven—satisfying the need for explicit phonics instruction, while intentionally triggering the brain’s “need-to-know” for prioritized learning.
Secret Stories® phonics instruction is designed to keep pace with learners’ needs as beginning readers and writers. Its brain based approach accelerates early learner skill mastery to better support phonics skill transfer to reading and writing. By systematically prioritizing learner access to high-leverage phonics skills and simultaneously offering additional skills (i.e. Secrets) as they are needed throughout the instructional day, Secret Stories® empowers early learners to bring more tools to the reading and writing table so as to take the maximum value away.
Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be utilized (Pinker 2009). This information on human nature should be the starting point for discussions on how to teach children to read and write. Research clearly shows phonics to be a cornerstone of effective, early reading instruction. “For reading scientists, the evidence that the phonological pathway is used in reading and is especially important in beginning reading is about as close to conclusive as research on complex human behavior can get” (Seidenberg, 2017, p. 124).
In order to become a reader, one has to develop these phonological paths. There are several ways to do this, but no way has been found to be more effective than explicit decoding instruction (focusing on phonemes—not on cueing systems). Kids need to become fearless code breakers, not left in the dark to guess. Many educators, however, continue to ignore this well-proven fact. Shanahan (2017), explains that educators should focus on what the research says kids need to learn to read, rather than focusing on elements that have no basis of evidence.
“Children need a flood of information, a banquet, a feast.” —Dr. Martha Pierson
By offering skill content through multiple learning modalities (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) learners gain easier access and are capable of more immediate retrieval (Siegal, 2006). When students find the right connections, they will learn. They won’t be able to help themselves. Concentrating heavily on storage and recall of unconnected facts is a very inefficient use of the brain. Studies show that with whole-brain teaching children learn faster and retain more.
By introducing information to the brain from as many angles as possible, more neural connections are created and strengthened. As a result, learning is more holistic and multidimensional. The more systems and modalities utilized for learning, the stronger the learners’ ability to receive and retrieve the information.
Secret Stories® phonics method aligns with the way our brain naturally learns by appealing to as many senses as possible through stories, movement, visuals, sounds, experiences and feelings. By engaging multiple modalities and pathways for learning, phonics skills are stored in different learning networks, providing learners with more avenues for easier retention and retrieval.
Secret Stories® multisensory learning experiences are woven into reading and writing across the instructional day so as to ensure phonics skill transfer to reading and writing.
Studies have revealed that more than 99 percent of learning occurs at the nonconscious level and that the nonconscious mind is responsible for the bulk of our mental processing.
“Learning at this level is effortless, and includes visual cues, sounds, experiences, and feelings processed by multiple memory systems and in varied learning domains.” —Dr. James Asher
In contrast, the conscious mind works much more slowly, and is overall less adept and efficient at processing information. For these reasons, it can be said that the nonconscious mind is more intelligent than the conscious mind (Williams, 2017).
After investigating various kinds of associative mnemonics in young children it was found that “the best connectives for remembering pairs of pictures or words were meaningful “actor-action object” relations (Rohwer, 1996).
Paired-associate learning in children is much improved when learners create or are provided with concrete, meaningful, interactive, and imaginable connections that link the stimulus and response terms in memory (Davidson & Adams, Ehri & Rohwer, Lippman & Shanahan, Rohwer & Levin, Rohwer, Lynch, Levin & Suzuki, 2011).
The task of learning letter-sound associations is not an easy one for beginners. Difficulties arise from several sources. The number of associations to be mastered is considerable: more than 40 sounds for 52 visual figures, plus sounds for combinations of letters (i.e., digraphs). Furthermore, the associations between letters and sounds are totally arbitrary, as there is nothing inherent in the visual symbol that suggests its name or sound. First graders had much trouble learning pairs of arbitrarily associated, meaningless terms (Ehri, Deffner and Wilce, 1984).
Integrating visual picture cues with phonics patterns enhances learners’ visual acuity prompting more immediate recognition of these complex patterns in text. Through investigation of various kinds of associative mnemonics in young children, it was found that the best connectives for remembering pairs of pictures or words were meaningful ‘actor-action object’ relations (Rohwer 1996). Paired-associate learning in children is much improved when learners create or are provided with concrete, meaningful, interactive, and imaginable connections that link the stimulus and response terms in memory. (Davidson & Adams, Ehri & Rohwer, Lippman & Shanahan, Rohwer & Levin, Rohwer, Lynch, Levin & Suzuki).
Secret Stories® posters incorporate visual sound cues for embedded phonics patterns, fostering independent skill access for reading and writing, and enhanced visual acuity for easy recognition of phonics patterns in text.
Auditory Phonics InstructionAuditory pathways are activated by sound and engage when both listening and talking. The left side of the brain processes rapid auditory information faster than the right. This skill is critical in separating the sounds of speech into distinct units for comprehension. The left hemisphere, usually responsible for language development, develops slower in the male brain. Thus, males often have usually developed more difficulties with reading.
Secret Stories® integrates the auditory pathways for learning with both storytelling and song. Through the telling and retelling of Secrets—as they are needed to read and spell words across the instructional day—to the musical brain teasers that build-up learners’ sound-skill automaticity, Secret Stories® prompts dual-hemisphere engagement in the brain.
Learning to Read KinestheticallyUnderstanding the research on body intelligence enables teachers to take advantage of muscle memory as an access point for learning.
“To persuade the ever-vigilant and blatantly suspicious gatekeeper—which is the left brain—to swing open a huge cathedral door on the right brain and let information gallop in unimpeded is body movement. The student’s body is our best ally for transmitting and receiving messages on the first exposure.” —Dr. James Asher
Children learn by touching and doing. Eric Jensen says this: “For younger students, learning has simply got to be hands-on, experiential, and relevant for patterns to develop” (Jensen, 2005). Children are active learners, particularly those at the earliest grade levels, which is why integrating psychomotor (physical/kinesthetic) learning into daily instruction is so important. There is a large collection of research that proves what many have suspected all along, human bodies are meant to have ample opportunities to move. As a result, learning is enhanced when movement is embedded in instruction.
This traditionally slow pace of individual letter-sound instruction at the earliest grade levels often takes an entire kindergarten year or more to acquire. This is despite the research on early literacy showing that a primary indicator of later student reading success is a student’s ability to master the individual letters and sounds by Halloween (Allington, 2013).
Secret Stories® taps into earlier developing, muscle memory to fast-track mastery of the individual letters and sounds so that pre-K and kindergartners are able to acquire them in just two weeks to two months—as compared to traditional instruction which takes an entire kindergarten year to teach the letter sounds.
Shortening this learning curve is important because once kids know the sounds that letters are supposed to make, they begin to notice when letters aren’t “doing what they should,” which prompts them to want to know the Secret!
Lyons and Ghetti (2011) noted that children, as young as four years of age, benefited from phonemic awareness and letter sound instruction when the instruction was presented in an interesting and entertaining way.
Studies prove that the body remembers as well as the mind, and for certain learners, even better. This is especially true for very young learners whose cognitive processing centers are often underdeveloped. This is also true for many struggling, upper-grade learners. For these young learners, physical/kinesthetic learning proves to be a far more reliable means of skill acquisition than traditional cognitive processing (Asher, 2012).
Secret Stories® instructional design bypasses areas of inherent early learner weakness (i.e. developmental readiness, cognitive processing, auditory delays, processing issues) and taps into alternate areas of learner strength (muscle memory and social-emotional intelligence) for early and accelerated skill acquisition.
Intentionally adding movement to enhance learning is referred to as embodied learning. This practice has been shown to enhance recall and aid in the transfer to long-term memory. This is because what fires together is wired together in the brain. Therefore, performing a task or recalling information that causes different neurons to fire in concert strengthens the connections between them (Immordino-Yang, 2017). In this way, learning becomes nonconscious and effortless.
Secret Stories® incorporates targeted physical movements for enhanced learning and automatic recall of associated phonics patterns and sounds.
When you have too many events or materials embedded in the same location (like months of learning in the same seat, in the same classroom in the same school) the information is there, but it’s nearly useless (Jensen, 2016).
“There is a wide gap between what we know about the brain and how we teach kids to read.”—Dr. Timothy Shanahan
Although there are a number of approaches to teaching phonics, not all are equally effective, nor do they make use of brain science. It is essential that educators be familiar with brain compatible practices and practices that are brain antagonistic. Based on what we currently know about the structure and function of the brain, brain compatible teaching emphasizes the way the brain naturally learns. Lessons that are brain compatible enable teachers to target instruction to areas of learner strength and bypass areas of inherent weakness (Sprenger, 2013).
Working naturally with the brain, Secret Stories® aligns phonics instruction with how our brains actually learn best, engaging more neural pathways for stronger learner-connections and easier skill retrieval. Secret Stories® accelerates early learner access to the code by taking advantage of learning loopholes rooted in the brain’s plasticity to bypass areas of learner weakness and tap into areas of strength.
The brain is malleable and is shaped by experience. An overwhelming body of evidence shows our brain is altered by everyday experiences, such as learning to read, learning vocabulary, studying for tests, or learning to play a musical instrument. The ability of the brain to rewire and remap itself by means of neuroplasticity is profound. When the correct skill-building protocol is used, educators can make positive and significant changes in our brains in a short time. Without understanding the “rules for how our brain changes,” educators can waste time and money, and students will fall through the cracks (Mahncke, 2006).
Our brain is involved in all we do, our brain changes from experience, therefore our experiences in learning at school will also change our brains. Education research and cognitive science have given us deeper insights into the process of learning…. we are beginning to understand more of the fundamental neurological processes that happen in the brain when we learn and remember.
“We talk about the brain being “plastic,” meaning that the brain changes its own wiring, perhaps almost continuously. Like a piece of silly putty, the brain is molded and reshaped by the forces of life acting on it.” —Dr. James Zull
We now understand that the brain has the quality of plasticity. It responds to experiences that stimulate activity in particular areas of the brain, thereby facilitating the growth of neural connections in and between those active regions. If the sequential developmental process—from sounding out to whole word recognition—does not occur, then children will be forced to employ less rapid and accurate systems such as prediction from context, guessing from pictures, and guessing from the first letter (Hempenstall, 2006).
“Quite apart from anything the teacher does, the student, being human, is a pattern finder and a pattern maker.” —Dr. David Bronson
The brain is often referred to as the ultimate pattern-making machine, seeking and storing memories based on patterns, or repeated relationships between ideas. This system facilitates our interpreting of the world—and all the new information we find throughout each day—based on prior experiences. Simply put, patterning is the brain’s way of doing things—coding, storing, connecting and retrieving information (Willis, 2008).
“It is wise for a teacher to take advantage of the natural inclination to seek patterns when teaching reading.” — Jody Willis
Because beginning learners have such limited access to the code and thus, only minimal awareness of the sounds that letters make in text, they are unable to pattern-out (i.e. make sense of) why letters come together and make the many different sounds that they do in text. To compensate, teachers will often rely on the rote memorization of sight words to help students “read.” This memorization effort is not only developmentally inappropriate for early grade learners, but also requires a vast amount of instructional time and resources (assistant and volunteer time, activities, material, etc). It is also far from ideal from a brain based learning perspective.
Secret Stories® aligns with the brain’s need to pattern, providing logical explanations for letter sound behavior that learners’ brains crave. This empowers beginning learners to easily predict letters’ most and next most likely sounds so that they can read words, rather than memorize them.
Stanford University’s study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development…
“Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading. In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out “C-A-T” sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word ‘cat,’ and the study found these teaching induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word. This groundbreaking study provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact.” —Dr. Bruce McCandliss
Additionally, rote memorization requires brain storage, which is not limitless. The human brain must discriminate which concepts and ideas should be placed into the working memory on its way to the long-term memory. It takes approximately 30 seconds for this process to occur. In deciding what to remember, our brains ask, “Does this make sense?” and “Does this have meaning?” Of these two criteria, meaning appears to have a greater impact on the probability that information will be stored for recall, especially if it has personal meaning. Presenting information that is too complex, lacks relevance, or provides insufficient sensory stimulation will be difficult to learn (Jenson, 2005).
According to Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2017), that feature of our biology makes perfect evolutionary sense, as one would not expend energy and effort trying to process random things that have no personal importance. Doing this would be a waste of energy. This has important implications for the way in which teachers design their lessons, especially in subject areas that inherently hold no personal meaning for learners, such as phonics skill instruction.
Knowing the Secrets (i.e. Secret Stories®) empowers kindergartners to decode more than 95% of the most common, high-frequency (Dolch and Fry) sight words.
“The brain seeks meaning and relevance, which is why it’s vital that we teach children within a context that is meaningful to them. If something does not make sense, the brain will drop it.” —Dr. Earl Miller
The brain seeks meaning and relevance, learning best on a need-to-know basis. However, traditional phonics instruction only offers arbitrary rules for letter sound behaviors with no meaning. Additionally, the individual letter sound skills that are taught at the earliest grade levels are often irrelevant to the sounds letters actually make in text. Moving instructional practice from what is fundamentally brain antagonistic to brain compatible requires students know how, and for what, information is to be used.
Secret Stories® provides beginning learners with open and accelerated access to the whole reading and writing code from the earliest possible grade levels, making it a critical base of support to any reading series or phonics program.
According to Dr. Geoff Petty (2014), traditional methods of instructional delivery and focusing curricula on key concepts must change. It is vital to align instruction with that which is important to learners. Information presented must be grounded in personal meaning or future relevance. Sousa (2006) emphasizes that while most teachers spend a significant amount of time making sure that their presentations make sense, they don’t often do enough to make sure the learning is meaningful and relevant to students.
While the brain is quite adept at learning, it’s important to ensure the quality of information, not the quantity. We can do this by purposely orchestrating meaning. Instructional focus should target strategies that enhance retention of learning and on curricula that students perceive as relevant to their lives. The best and most durable learning occurs when content sparks interest and is relevant to a child’s life (Immordino-Yang, 2015).
Secret Stories® forges meaningful connections to otherwise meaningless letter sound skills in order to make them relevant to learners, and thereby mark them for memory and prioritized learning in the brain. Learner driven instruction aligns with the brain’s “need-to-know” and actively engages all students in the learning process. The “need-to-know” is also a driving force behind Secret Stories® accelerated instruction, and is a basic tenet of brain based learning upon which Secret Stories® is built.
A cornerstone of Secret Stories® instructional design is simultaneous skill access with “dual-track” instruction, ensuring an explicit and systematic approach to skill introduction that is also learner-driven.
“It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about. Deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts. Emotion guides our learning. The emotional brain filters all incoming information. If it is emotionally stimulating, it will be marked for memory and prioritized learning in the brain. — Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Understanding the affective “social-emotional” learning domain and the important role that emotions play in learning can have a great impact on teachers, particularly as it relates to the brain and brain development.
The brain develops back to front, which is important to understand as it is not until the frontal lobe makes enough connections that higher level thinking takes place. The earlier-developing, affective “feeling” networks are more primed for learning than are the slower developing, higher level, processing centers.
While sensory lobes in the back store sensory memories (the past), it is the frontal lobes that focus on critical thinking and problem-solving (the present). It is the frontal lobe that is the critical thinker and the last to develop (Knox, 2010). Thus, brain maturation is an extremely important aspect of early learner development, and an understanding of the process is critical to appropriate early grade instruction and lesson design (Immordino-Yang & Fischer, 2009).
Secret Stories® targets instruction to earlier-developing, affective learning domain by aligning abstract phonics skills to learners’ already existing framework of social and emotional experience and understanding, sparking genuine interest and increasing the level of learner engagement. Within this readily familiar and easily accessible thinking-construct, beginning (and struggling upper) grade learners are able to predict the most likely sound behaviors of letters, just as they would the behaviors of their own friends and classmates.
“Deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts. Meaningful learning happens when teachers are able to create an emotional connection to what might otherwise remain abstract concepts, ideas or skills—even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional. ” —Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Creating this emotional connection can seem a daunting task, but research has shown that the investment reaps huge dividends in the form of increased learning and achievement (Immordino-Yang, 2016). Learning is the brain’s business. Students will not practice in a meaningful way unless they care. When students find the right connections, they will learn. They won’t be able to help themselves.
“Emotions simply exist; we don’t have to learn them.” —Dr. James Asher
Secret Stories® provides a “backdoor” for phonics skill mastery by infusing instruction with meaningful, social and emotional learner connections.
Evidence suggests that factors like: relevance, emotions, and context and pattern making are critical to making meaning. Why and how do emotions engage meaning? Intense emotions trigger the release of the chemicals, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and vasopressin. They signal the brain, ‘keep this, this is important.” Presenting information that is too complex, lacks relevance, or provides insufficient sensory stimulation will be difficult to learn (Jensen, 2005). Through emotion, synapse strength is modified and the responsiveness of neuron networks can be dramatically changed. Emotion and thought are physically entangled— immensely so. This brings our body into the story because we feel our emotions in our body, and the way we feel always influences our brain.
For early grade teachers, as well as those working with struggling readers at the upper-grade levels, it can be difficult to foster learner curiosity about letter sounds and phonics patterns. This is why the affective learning domain is the ideal doorway through which to channel these critical skills. Targeting phonics skill instruction to learners’ already-existing frameworks of social and emotional experience and understanding sparks a genuine learner interest and increases the level of learner engagement.
Secret Stories® aligns letter behavior with kid behavior to provide logical, concrete, and right hemispheric connections for reading, writing, and spelling.
The easiest way to trigger engagement in the affective learning domain is through stories. Stories establish supportive conditions in the brain for learning and remembering, acting as a sort of memory enhancer. The structure of a story provides a sort of mental map upon which new information is more easily laid. Even in algebra or history, when the new information is presented in a familiar story form, the memory structure facilitates the brain’s retention of that information (Willis, 2009). Moreover, concepts presented in a story-based format receive a higher level of priority in the brain, often using an emotional hook to engage curiosity (Immordino-Yang, 2017).
“I’ve given up on explaining as a teaching tool. When I began to understand knowledge as consisting of networks of neurons….my students’ knowledge was actually physically different from my own… our networks differed. When I explained something, I had to use my own networks; and for my students to understand it, they had to use theirs. Maybe the two sets of networks were just too different. So I reduced my explanations and instead turned to demonstrations, metaphors, and stories. As much as possible I tried to show rather than explain things. And when explaining seemed inescapable, I asked other students to do it, reasoning that their networks were a better match with those of their peers.” —Dr. James Zull
Concentrating heavily on storage and recall of unconnected facts is a very inefficient use of the brain. Studies show that with whole-brain teaching (also known as Total Physical Response) children learn faster and retain more, dropout rates decrease by 90%, and the health of the brain is improved (Asher, 2003). The more brain areas we use, the more neurons fire and the more neural networks change—and thus the more learning occurs (Zull, 2011). Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling; they are woven into our DNA (Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, & Zacks, 2009).
Stories can put the whole brain to work and are the most effective way to activate multiple areas of the brain, simultaneously.
—Dr. James Zull
Research shows that the more widespread the connections, the deeper the learning. The more brain areas we use, the more neurons fire and the more neural networks change—and thus the more learning occurs (Zull, 2011). Stories activate the emotional centers of the brain that aid memory, and unlike with direct instruction, skill content delivered through storytelling promotes the formation of multi-layered memories that result in deeper learning experiences and easier skill retrieval.
Secret Stories® facilitates deeper learning by fostering opportunities for critical analysis and diagnostic thinking. By connecting letter behavior with kid behavior, Secret Stories® creates a familiar thinking-construct in which learners are able to apply logical deduction to determine the most and next most likely sound behaviors of letters in unknown words.
Additionally, the brain becomes more active when telling or listening to a story, prompting higher levels of learner engagement. The benefits of embedding abstract skill content into stories is a great pedagogical strategy because it increases learner-curiosity and the thought processes that support it. If a student is not interested in a topic, they probably don’t have enough knowledge or experience in that area to develop the sense of curiosity. In situations where students lack interest, it is the job of the teacher to expose them to the relevance of it (Immordino-Yang, 2017).
For early grade teachers, as well as those working with struggling readers at the upper-grade levels, it can be difficult to foster learner-curiosity about letter sounds and phonics patterns. By targeting phonics skill instruction to learners’ already existing frameworks of social and emotional experience and understanding, Secret Stories® sparks a genuine learner interest about letter behavior, increasing the overall level of learner engagement.
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