Early literacy practice with Lalilo was associated with higher levels of growth in general literacy achievement. Students who used Lalilo more intensively and for a longer period experienced the most growth in their literacy skills. Less intense and less frequent use of Lalilo was associated with relatively less achievement growth, but even lighter use was associated with more growth relative to students who did not use the program at all. These results remained consistent across struggling readers, English language Learners, and students from Title I schools.The full report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R63694>.

This document examines the evidence base for Lalilo that meets the requirements of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).The full report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R61887>.

The Phase II evaluation of Lalilo, independently conducted by WestEd, focused on the program’s impact on first grade students' literacy skills and reading attitudes. The quasi-experimental study involved 29 teachers and their students, divided into treatment and comparison groups. Results included detecting that Lalilo had a large significant positive impact on students’ oral reading fluency skills. This is an important outcome because fluency is both a critical component of literacy and a strong predictor of later reading success. Effects were particularly strong for students needing the most support. Teachers and students reported high satisfaction with the program, and in particular teachers highlighted its effectiveness in improving both student engagement and reading skills.Citation: Soo Ping Chow, A., Nilsen, K., Cruz, J., & Ciancio, D. (2024). Impact and implementation evaluation of Lalilo: Phase II report. WestEd.The executive summary is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R67886>.(Email research@renaissance.com to request a copy of the full study from the Renaissance Research Department.)

From the study: "The purpose of this report was to evaluate the Lalilo software program. Three research questions guided the current study.1. Do students in classrooms using Lalilo experience more growth in literacy skills relative to students in classrooms that do not use the program? Overall, students in schools that used Lalilo grew at a greater rate than students in schools that did not use Lalilo.2. Do classrooms that follow best practice guidelines for the program confer greater student growth relative to classrooms that do not? More specific measures of fidelity or usage benchmarks may shed light on the relationship between adherence to best practice guidelines and student growth in early literacy skills.3. To what degree is the intensity in which Lalilo is used (e.g., number of lessons completed / number of minutes program was used) related to the magnitude of growth in literacy skills amongst students in classrooms that use the program?Increasing the number of minutes or days spent using Lalilo was not critical to the improvement in weekly growth of early literacy skills. Instead increasing the number of learning objectives validated resulted in the largest improvements".Citation: Van Norman, E. R., & Forcht, E. R. (2024). An evaluation of the impact of the Lalilo software program: Research report prepared for Renaissance Learning. Center for Promoting Research to Practice, Lehigh University.The study is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R67557>.

"In 2021, WestEd partnered with Renaissance Learning to examine the impact of Lalilo on literacy achievement and reading attitudes among first grade students, and to develop an understanding of the link between Lalilo implementation, contextual factors, and program impact. Nineteen first grade teachers and reading specialists, and their students, were recruited to use Lalilo during the 2022-23 school year. This brief provides findings from the evaluation that relate to educators’ impressions of the Lalilo student program and educator dashboard, educators’ reported implementation of Lalilo, and educators’ perceptions of the impact of Lalilo on literacy achievement and student motivation and attitudes towards reading."Citation: Soo Ping Chow, A., Nilsen, K., Boxerman, J., Cruz, J., & Ciancio, D. (2023). Impact and implementation evaluation of Lalilo: Phase 1 brief. WestEd. The study is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R67209>.

From the abstract; "In the scope of our oral reading exercise for 5-8-year-old children, models need to be able to precisely detect and diagnose reading mistakes, which remains a considerable challenge even for state-of-the-art ASR systems. In this paper, we compare hybrid and end-to-end acoustic models trained for phoneme recognition on young learners' speech. We evaluate them not only with phoneme error rates but through detailed phoneme-level misread detection and diagnostic metrics. We show that a traditional TDNNF-HMM model, despite a high PER, is the best at detecting reading mistakes (F1-score 72.6%), but at the cost of a low specificity (74.7%), which is pedagogically critical. A recent Transformer+CTC model, to which we applied our synthetic reading mistakes augmentation method, obtains the highest precision (81.8%) and specificity (86.3%), as well as the highest correct diagnosis rate (70.7%), showing it is the best fit for our application."Citation: Gelin, L., Daniel, M., Pellegrini, T., & Pinquier, J. (2023). Comparing phoneme recognition systems on the detection and diagnosis of reading mistakes for young children's oral reading evaluation. SLaTE 2023-INTERSPEECH 2023 Satellite workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland-August 18-20, 2023.

Lalilo has recently received Digital Promise's Research-Based Design product certification. This certification is intended to serve as a reliable signal for consumers, including school administrators, educators, and families, looking for evidence of educational technology (edtech) products that are based in research about learning. Renaissance submitted evidence confirming a link between research on how students learn and Lalilo's design.The certification is available online: <https://productcertifications.digitalpromise.org/research-based-certified-products/>.

This white paper contains the research foundation for Lalilo. The Full Report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R63394>.

From the abstract: "From January to June 2020, we conducted a randomized controlled efficacy study of the Lalilo software on learning to read. The results suggest a positive impact of using Lalilo in the classroom and then at home when schools closed. These results are encouraging for Lalilo and suggest that use in the context of pedagogical continuity has a positive impact on literacy skills. Here we present our methodology and discuss the limitations of this study."The Full Report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R63386>.

From the introduction: "The Lalilo English program has been developed to enable students to practice foundational pre-reading and reading skills in English. The skills include Phonological Awareness, Letter Recognition, Phonics, Word Work, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension. In November and December of 2019, WestEd staff conducted a subject matter expert review and an alignment review of Lalilo's literacy program. In addition, the WestEd team reviewed the program's content and exercises for alignment to the English and Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS)." To obtain a copy of the review, email the Renaissance Research Department: research@renaissance.com.