For educators, specialists & researchers
The research foundation of A New Page
A New Page is a Structured Literacy program for the home. This page lays out the published research, professional standards, and instructional frameworks it is built on, and, for each one, exactly how it is implemented in the program. Full references are at the bottom.
The frameworks we build on
Structured Literacy
The whole program is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic instruction in the structure of written language, phonology, sound, symbol correspondence, syllables, morphology, syntax. There is no guessing from pictures or context; we teach decoding directly, and we do not use the disproven three-cueing model.
Sources: International Dyslexia Association, definition of Structured Literacy & Structured Literacy: An Introductory Guide (2020); IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (2018).
The Science of Reading consensus
Our instructional choices follow the convergent, peer-reviewed evidence on how children learn to read, explicit, systematic phonics for word reading, built alongside language comprehension.
Sources: Castles, Rastle & Nation (2018), Ending the Reading Wars; National Reading Panel (2000).
The Simple View of Reading & Scarborough's Reading Rope
Reading comprehension is the product of word recognition × language comprehension. A New Page is built to develop the word-recognition strands (decoding, sight-word/orthographic mapping) with rigor, while the parent's narration and the story carry language comprehension, a deliberate two-voice design.
Sources: Gough & Tunmer (1986); Scarborough (2001).
How the research maps to what a child does in a session
Every session is one structured-literacy lesson, three short parts, about 15 minutes. Here is the principle behind each part.
Sound play, phonemic awareness
Each lesson opens with a minute of phoneme work (blending, segmenting, sound swaps) tied to the day's pattern, and it lands on letters within the same session: the sounds flow straight into letter cards and word chains. Phonemic awareness is among the strongest predictors of later reading, and instruction that connects phonemes to print outperforms oral-only drills.
Sources: National Reading Panel (2000); Ehri et al. (2001); Rice et al. (2022) meta-analysis on phonemic awareness with print.
A systematic scope & sequence, phonics
Skills are introduced in a fixed, cumulative order; nothing appears in a child's reading before it is taught. The sequence follows a published, university-developed systematic phonics scope and sequence.
Sources: UFLI Foundations, Lane & Contesse (2022), University of Florida Literacy Institute; National Reading Panel (2000).
Decodable connected text, the "firewall"
The lines the child reads are generated to contain only phoneme, grapheme correspondences and words already taught. A child never has to guess a word they have not been equipped to sound out, decodable text matched to the scope and sequence. There is a deeper reason this matters: every successful sound-out of a real word in a real story is a self-teaching event, the mechanism by which readers build their own word memory (Share's self-teaching hypothesis). The story engine exists to manufacture those events, every night, at exactly the child's step.
Sources: Mesmer (2005), Text decodability and the first-grade reader; National Reading Panel (2000); Share (1995).
Heart words, orthographic mapping
Irregular high-frequency words are taught explicitly: the regular parts are decoded and the irregular part is flagged, so the word is mapped into memory rather than guessed. This reflects how readers store words for instant retrieval.
Sources: Ehri (2005; 2014), phases of word reading & orthographic mapping.
Multisensory routines & explicit teaching
Children tap each sound, blend it, read it, and spell it, a see/say/build/write loop with scripted teaching and immediate corrective feedback. This draws on the Orton-Gillingham instructional lineage and the principles of explicit instruction.
Sources: Gillingham & Stillman (1997); Archer & Hughes (2011), Explicit Instruction; Rosenshine (2012), Principles of Instruction.
Rereading, fluency
Each line is reread to build accuracy and rate. Repeated reading is a well-supported method for improving fluency and, through it, comprehension.
Sources: Therrien (2004) meta-analysis; National Reading Panel (2000), guided oral reading.
Dictation, encoding
Children spell what they have read. Encoding is the inverse of decoding and reinforces phoneme, grapheme knowledge; spelling and reading draw on the same underlying system.
Sources: Moats (2020), Speech to Print.
Retell, comprehension
After every story, the child retells it in their own words. Oral retell is an established indicator of reading comprehension, and it keeps the session about meaning, not just word-calling.
Sources: Reed & Vaughn (2012); National Reading Panel (2000), comprehension.
Spaced review of every miss
Every missed word or pattern returns automatically on a spaced schedule until it is solid. Distributed, spaced practice produces more durable learning than massed repetition.
Sources: Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006), distributed-practice meta-analysis.
Assessment & progress monitoring
Placement across the right domains
The opening check directly administers phonological skill (blending, segmenting, deleting sounds), real-word decoding, nonsense-word reading (pure decoding, not memory), a survey of decoding across increasingly complex spelling patterns (blends, digraphs, vowel teams, and beyond), a short spelling cross-check, and a listening-comprehension moment, and places the child conservatively. Spelling and oral-reading fluency are then measured continuously inside the program, spelling through guided dictation every session and fluency through a weekly timed oral reading, so placement reflects only what it actually tests.
Sources: IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards (2018); National Reading Panel (2000).
Curriculum-based progress monitoring
The weekly report uses oral reading fluency (words correct per minute) as a curriculum-based measure, charts the child against their own trend, and contextualizes a single benchmark against national ORF norms, framed as progress monitoring, never as a diagnosis.
Sources: Deno (1985), Curriculum-Based Measurement; Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017), Oral Reading Fluency norms.
Engagement & reading identity
Struggling readers read less and fall further behind, so motivation is not a luxury. A New Page gives the child an age-appropriate story they drive, including dignity for older readers who have been failed by materials built for much younger children, so that daily practice actually happens.
Sources: Stanovich (1986), "Matthew effects" in reading.
Dose and pacing, honestly
Fifteen minutes a night, most nights, is roughly 90 to 105 minutes a week, squarely inside the range used by school Tier 2 reading interventions (typically 20 to 40 minutes, 3 to 5 days a week). The research on catching up is consistent about one thing: accumulated hours are the currency, and consistency over months beats intensity in bursts (Torgesen et al., 2001; Scammacca et al., 2015). A child who is years behind will need months of steady work, not weeks, and we would rather tell you that on day one than let a dashboard imply otherwise. The same research also says it is never too late, and that starting earlier multiplies the payoff, which is why the reading check is free and takes ten minutes tonight.
Three practical notes from the wider evidence. First, the weekly floor matters most: large-scale Dutch home-practice research found results arrive when families reliably hit about 40 minutes and up per week, and quietly stall below it, which is exactly what our four-night Reading Week goal protects. Second, run the session after your child has had time to decompress, never straight off the school bus; a struggling reader's school day already costs double. Third, the bedtime slot is genuinely good: words learned near sleep are retained better (a promising, though not yet definitive, line of research), so a story that ends with lights out is not a compromise, it is a strategy.
What we deliberately left out, and why
Families of struggling readers are marketed a lot of things that do not work, so here is our list, in the open. No “dyslexia fonts”: controlled studies found no reading benefit (Wery & Diliberto, 2016; Kuster et al., 2018), and the International Dyslexia Association agrees. No colored overlays or tinted lenses, no vision therapy, no “brain training,” no Davis method: none has credible evidence for reading. Our dyslexia display mode (larger text, more spacing, calmer backgrounds) is offered as comfort and preference, never as treatment, because that is all the evidence supports. And our audio follows one rule: a child can tap to hear a word after trying it, and the parent's narration is never read aloud by the app on the child's own lines. The ears help the story; the eyes do the reading practice.
What we do not claim
A New Page is a structured-literacy practice tool for the home, designed to make high-quality daily reading work consistent and measurable. It is educational support, not a diagnosis, a clinical intervention, or a replacement for a trained specialist where one is needed.
We have not yet conducted an independent efficacy study of A New Page. We are actively seeking educators, specialists, and researchers to review the program, pilot it, and help us build that evidence honestly.
References
- Archer, A. L., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching. Guilford Press.
- Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5 to 51.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354 to 380.
- Deno, S. L. (1985). Curriculum-based measurement: The emerging alternative. Exceptional Children, 52(3), 219 to 232.
- Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167 to 188.
- Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5 to 21.
- Gillingham, A., & Stillman, B. W. (1997). The Gillingham Manual: Remedial Training for Students with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling, and Penmanship. Educators Publishing Service.
- Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6 to 10.
- Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702). Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon.
- International Dyslexia Association. (2018). Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading.
- International Dyslexia Association. (2020). Structured Literacy: An Introductory Guide.
- Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Equipped for Reading Success. Casey & Kirsch Publishers.
- Lane, H. B., & Contesse, V. A. (2022). UFLI Foundations: An Explicit and Systematic Phonics Program. University of Florida Literacy Institute / Ventris Learning.
- Mesmer, H. A. E. (2005). Text decodability and the first-grade reader. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21(1), 61 to 86.
- Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (3rd ed.). Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read. U.S. Government Printing Office.
- Reed, D. K., & Vaughn, S. (2012). Retell as an indicator of reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 16(3), 187 to 217.
- Rice, M., Erbeli, F., Thompson, C. G., Sallese, M. R., & Fogarty, M. (2022). Phonemic awareness: A meta-analysis for planning effective instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 57(4), 1259 to 1289.
- Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 12 to 19.
- Scammacca, N. K., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., & Stuebing, K. K. (2015). A meta-analysis of interventions for struggling readers in grades 4 to 12: 1980 to 2011. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 48(4), 369 to 390.
- Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of Early Literacy Research (pp. 97 to 110). Guilford Press.
- Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151 to 218.
- Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360 to 407.
- Therrien, W. J. (2004). Fluency and comprehension gains as a result of repeated reading: A meta-analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 25(4), 252 to 261.
- Torgesen, J. K., Alexander, A. W., Wagner, R. K., Rashotte, C. A., Voeller, K. K. S., & Conway, T. (2001). Intensive remedial instruction for children with severe reading disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 34(1), 33 to 58.
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A New Page is a program from A New Story · The full scope & sequence · The science (for parents) · What a specialist does · For schools & specialists