Dear Reimaginer,
In the four years that we’ve been inviting academics, ed tech entrepreneurs, and skilled teachers to submit their work to Reimagine Education, we’ve seen numerous examples of creativity – of innovative thinking – of passionate ambition to improve educational outcomes. The projects that have set themselves apart, however, are those that we can see transforming educational outcomes for students around the world, demonstrating outstanding scalability as well as originality and effectiveness.
There is, perhaps, no skill more fundamental for educational achievement than literacy. The Matthew Effect – applied by Keith Stanovich to the study of literacy – justifies such a statement: those who acquire the ‘phonological awareness’ (Stanovich argues in his 1986 paper, ‘Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy‘) conducive to reading success at an early age experience positive feedback loops that enable them to negotiate more complex texts. These feedback loops, in turn, ‘appear to be potent sources of individual differences in academic achievement’.