The science behind A New Page
The research, for specialists
Plain words first: what your child does each night, and why it works. The research, the protocol and every reference sit behind “For specialists.”
7 nights free. No card. Nothing to cancel. Or try the free reading check first.
Built on the reading research that actually works
Most reading apps say “science of reading” and move on. Here is the research we are built on, in plain words, and how each piece shows up in what your child does every night.
Who this is for. Some children learn to read with very little teaching. Many more do not. At least half of children need reading taught step by step, out loud and in order, to read well, and some need that plus much more practice, at their exact level, for a lot longer than a typical school year allows. That is exactly who A New Page was built for. Every choice follows from it: moving on only when a skill is solid, bringing missed words back, tiny wins at the child’s exact step, and your voice carrying the story so your child’s voice can carry the reading.
The approach. A New Page teaches with step-by-step reading lessons (specialists call this structured literacy): sounds and letters taught out loud, in a set order, each building on the last. There is no guessing from pictures or context. We teach children to sound words out.
For specialists Structured Literacy, the IDA standards, the Ladder of Reading
Dr. Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading & Writing is one of the clearest maps of how differently children come to reading. It maps how differently children come to reading: a small share learn to read with very little explicit teaching, a larger share learn relatively easily with broad instruction (though most still need explicit teaching for spelling and writing), and roughly half or more need code-based, systematic, explicit instruction to become skilled readers, with a further group needing all of that plus intensive practice and many repetitions, at their exact skill level, for a lot longer than a typical curriculum allows. Young presents these proportions as approximations and updates them, so see her current infographic for the exact figures.
Put those groups together and it is at least half of children who need explicit, systematic teaching to learn to read well. For a lot of them, it is more than that. This is exactly the audience A New Page was built for, and it is why every design choice, the mastery gating, the spaced review, the tiny wins at the child's exact step, the parent voice carrying the story so the child's voice can carry the decoding, follows from that reality rather than from a marketing wish. The rest of this page walks the science under those choices.
Five things every reader builds, and what your child does for each
We teach the three word-level skills (hearing sounds, matching sounds to letters, reading smoothly) directly, and the two language skills (word meaning and understanding) grow through the stories you read together.
One straight answer, about the earliest readers
For a child at the very earliest steps (roughly steps 1.1 through 1.7), the story worlds run in a warm-up mode: the parent still reads the full episode aloud, and the child reads short decodable warm-up lines that match the beat and their own skill exactly, rather than the story's authored line word for word. The moment their skills reach mid-Level-1 (about step 1.8 to 2.5, depending on the beat), the child begins reading the story's own words directly, and by step 2.5 the whole ladder of story lines is open. This is on purpose. We would rather a child read a warm-up sentence they can actually decode than trip over a story sentence with a vowel team they have not been taught yet. The story never disappears; the child's voice grows into it.
How practice is built
Four habits run under every night. Your child pulls sounds and words from memory before any hint. Words they have learned come back on a widening schedule instead of disappearing. Tonight’s new sound is practiced alongside old ones. And a few “old friends” from earlier levels turn up on ordinary nights so nothing goes cold.
For specialists National Reading Panel, the Reading Rope, the Simple View, the researchers
The frameworks we’re built on
The researchers whose work this stands on
We build on their published science. We don’t claim they endorse us; we claim we did our homework.
- Drs. Sally & Bennett Shaywitz (Yale)Dyslexia is a specific difference, not a deficit, a “sea of strengths.” We teach to the gap without shaming the child.
- Dr. Louisa MoatsA lead author of the IDA standards and “speech-to-print” instruction, the structure of our scope.
- Dr. Linnea EhriOrthographic mapping, the science under our spaced review.
- Dr. David KilpatrickEfficient word-learning depends on phonemic proficiency, why we build sound skills to mastery.
- Drs. Maryanne Wolf & Mark SeidenbergFluency and automaticity are their own pillar; reading must be taught explicitly.
- Castles, Rastle & Nation, Ending the Reading Wars (2018)The definitive modern synthesis: systematic phonics first, then fluency and meaning. Our sequence follows that arc.
The domains a Structured Literacy program should cover
The IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards set what a teacher of reading should know and be able to do across these domains. Here is how A New Page covers each, and, honestly, where we are still deepening.
Reading outcomes
Does A New Page work? The evidence, reported honestly
Most reading programs ask you to trust a testimonial. We measure every child the way a reading specialist would, publish the method before we look at the results, and report honestly, limitations included.
Collecting now
We are gathering baseline-to-repeat measurements right now. To keep this honest, we publish gain numbers once we have at least 20 children with two or more checks. The method below is fixed and public in advance, so the results cannot be massaged when they arrive.
Our honesty rule. Until the sample is large enough to defend, this page shows the method and the amount of data collected, not a gain number we could not stand behind. When the numbers publish, every limitation publishes with them. We would rather earn the claim than borrow it.
What we measure
Reading speed
Words read correctly in one minute, on text at your child’s level. The main measure.
Accuracy
How many words are read correctly. Speed only counts once accuracy holds, so speed never hides guessing.
Sounding out
Made-up words your child has never seen, so they can’t guess. It shows real sounding out, not memory.
Nights read
How much each child actually used the program, reported next to every result.
For specialists design, effect sizes, independent review
What we measure, in the field’s terms
Curriculum-based measures built on the same designs specialists use (oral reading fluency, nonsense-word fluency, accuracy), scored by the parent, not homemade quizzes. Taken as an early baseline once the first sounds are taught, and again over time.
How we analyze it
- Single-group pre/post, running continuously. Every child is their own baseline. Largest sample, honest about its limits.
- Effect size (Cohen's d) with 95% confidence intervals, so a reviewer can judge the strength and the uncertainty, not just a headline number.
- Growth versus expected. We check whether children are closing the gap to grade-level norms, not merely moving, because ordinary maturation moves everyone a little.
- Dosage and attrition reported openly, results stratified by how much the child actually used the program. No cherry-picking.
- Published in advance. The design and the primary outcome are written down on this site before we look at results, so the goalposts cannot move. Read the full measurement protocol and evidence base.
Independent review. As the dataset grows we will seek independent administration by school and university researchers, submit qualifying studies to Evidence for ESSA, and seek a structured-literacy alignment review. A result carries more weight when the name attached to it is not ours.
Norms: Hasbrouck and Tindal (2017) oral reading fluency data. Measures are curriculum-based (oral reading fluency, nonsense-word fluency, accuracy), scored by the adult, taken as an early baseline once the first sounds are taught, and again over time.
The protocol
How we measure, exactly: the placement and measurement protocol
Precise enough for a reading specialist to inspect, plain enough for a parent. Where something is a known limitation, we say so out loud.
- A starting point, not a grade or a labelThe free reading check finds where your child should start. It stops early when the answer is clear, and when two starting points make sense it picks the easier one on purpose.
- A one-minute reading check, about once a weekMatched to your child’s level. Your child never sees a timed number, a score or a ranking, only a warm word at the end. The numbers live on your report.
- Accuracy firstWe count growth in speed only once your child reads about 96 words in 100 correctly.
- Moving on only when a skill is solidYour child moves to the next step after getting it right 9 times in 10, two nights in a row. Missed words keep coming back until they stick.
- We tell you when home practice is not enoughIf growth stays flat under full support, the program says so in writing and points you to a free school evaluation. That message never sells anything.
- A person always scoresYou (or an older reader) mark every word by tapping. No machine grades your child’s voice. There is no speech recognition anywhere.
For specialists: the full protocol placement stop rules, probes, norms, mastery gates, the nonresponse rule
1. Placement: the starting reading check
The free reading check finds a starting step, not a grade or a label. It runs in parts and adapts as the child reads:
- What is checked. Letter sounds, real word reading, nonsense word reading (we call them robot words, and every word is explicitly tagged real or robot, never guessed by position), then an adaptive survey of pattern layers: blends, digraphs, silent e and soft c and g, endings and two syllable words, tch and dge and y and consonant le, r controlled vowels, vowel teams, diphthongs, and affixes, five words per layer.
- Correct means read correctly on the child's own attempt. The adult marks every item; a near miss counts as a miss.
- Stop rules. The check stops early the moment the signal is clear: fewer than ten letter sounds places the child at the very first step; under 60 percent on real short words stops the check and places at the first unknown letter sound; a pattern layer passes at 4 of 5, and two consecutive failed layers end the survey. Older readers who read fluently skip ahead through an advanced gate rather than grinding through material below them.
- Tired is respected. Once enough signal exists, every screen carries a stop here and use a safe starting level escape. An early stop still produces a valid, conservative placement.
- Placement is conservative by design. The child is placed at the first wobbly layer, and any layer the survey did not reach is treated as untested, never assumed known. When two starting points are defensible we take the easier one on purpose. An advanced reader who reads six band-level real words cleanly must also read band-level robot words (nonsense strings) to keep the skip; a reader who reads familiar words by sight but cannot decode a novel string is placed where blending is taught, not above it.
- Age and starting level are recorded separately. Age sets the story register and session shape. What the child actually read sets the starting step. The two never contaminate each other.
- Reuse window. A completed check is honored for 30 days, so a family who checks tonight and signs up Thursday never repeats it. Children under five skip the check entirely and route to the Littles track, no tests at three and four.
2. Curriculum-based measures: the weekly one minute check
- Cadence. The first check runs once the child is actually reading, at step 1.3 or later, never on night one for a non-reader; after that, about every fifth session, roughly weekly at the recommended dose. Checks never run on a level mastery day.
- The measure matches the level, and rotates. There is no timed passage before the end of Level 4, because oral reading fluency norms do not exist before mid first grade. Instead the check rotates through the curriculum-based measure that fits the level: in Level 1, letter sounds (and letter names), then robot words and real words once at least two short vowels and four consonants are taught; in Levels 2 to 4, robot words, real words, sound segmenting (breaking a spoken word into its sounds, no letters), and a two minute spelling check; from Level 5, a one minute connected-text passage, alternating between the previous level's exit passage and a passage stitched from the decodable sentences of the steps taught so far in the current level, plus a three minute comprehension maze. Early measure items are generated from the child's taught inventory at the time of the check, so the lists grow and change difficulty across checks; they are progress indicators, not equated alternate forms. A timed letter check never runs until at least ten letters are taught, and lists never repeat items to fill time; the score prorates by the actual seconds read.
- Scoring. Every reading measure is scored by a person, by tapping, never by machine: the reading partner for readers under 14, and the reader themselves in the self-directed track (ages 14 and up by default, 11 and up by choice), where the target is mechanically hidden until they commit to an answer. The one exception is the maze passage for older readers, where the app counts the word choices your child taps. Words correct per minute is words correct divided by actual elapsed seconds, times sixty. Robot words are scored as whole words: the reader must blend the sounds into a word. Sound segmenting is scored per segment. Spelling is scored by correct letter sequences.
- Self corrections. The marker can unmark a word the reader fixed. The tapped mark is always the record; no machine ever overrides it.
- What the child sees. The child never sees a timed number, a score, or a percentile, and there is no numeric countdown on screen: only a warm word at the end. The number, the accuracy, and the growth trend live on the parent's report.
3. Norms and goals
- The norm table. Hasbrouck and Tindal 2017 oral reading fluency national norms, grade 1 (winter and spring) through grade 6, by season (fall, winter, spring). There is no grade 1 fall norm in the source, so a fall first grader gets personal growth only. Grade is asked once at placement and used directly; when a family prefers not to say, an age estimate is used and labeled as such on the report. Sources are on the evidence page.
- The goal is the 50th percentile. Fast enough. We do not chase speed past it, and the paced reread feature is capped at the grade level 50th percentile by design, so a child is never pushed to race.
- Accuracy comes first. Our reporting bar is 96 percent of words read correctly. That number is a working convention, not a research finding: the field generally treats roughly 95 to 98 percent as comfortable reading, and we picked the middle of that band and held it constant so the trend means something. Below that bar, the weekly note tells the parent plainly that we feed accuracy, not speed, and growth in rate is not celebrated until accuracy holds.
- Young readers are protected. Kindergarten and below, and grade 1 in the fall, are never norm compared: they get personal growth only. Readers above grade 6 are compared against the grade 6 ceiling.
- Norms are parent facing only. A struggling reader sees their own progress, never a national comparison.
- The validity limit, stated plainly. National norms only fully apply when a child reads an unseen passage at their actual grade level. Our weekly check uses a decodable passage at the child's instructional level inside the program, which is the right text for measuring growth, and the wrong text for declaring a national percentile. So the growth trend is the number we stand behind, the norm band is context, and for a formal grade-level fluency score we point families to the school's own benchmark screener, run three times a year at no cost.
4. Mastery gates: what holds a child at a step
- Step mastery. A session's mastery percentage counts the items a grown-up actually scored: the step's word work, dictation, and any story words marked as missed. Story words nobody marked never count as correct. A step is mastered only after two consecutive sessions at 90 percent or better, with at least five scored items each, and any session below 90 percent resets the streak. Nothing advances on one good day.
- Level exit gates. Finishing a level's last step triggers a mastery check day: real words at 90 percent, nonsense words at 80 percent, dictation at 80 percent, and the exit passage at 95 percent, all four at once, passed twice in a row, before the next level opens.
- When mastery stalls, the program acts instead of repeating. Four practice days without mastery triggers focus sessions (a shorter set, 80 percent known material). Three focus sessions without mastery drops back one step. Still stuck triggers one more set of short, focused sessions with the sound-play warm-up first. Beyond that, the escalation flag below. A step-back to rebuild is reported to you plainly as planned support, never as an advancement.
- Missed words never disappear. Every miss enters the spaced review queue and returns until it is beaten twice.
5. The nonresponse rule
A home program owes families the truth about when home practice is not enough. The program raises a professional evaluation flag, in writing, in the session summary and the weekly note, when any of these fire:
- Flat growth under full support. The child has at least four checks of the same measure and has already been through the full stall ladder, and the recent checks are no more than one word per minute above the earlier ones.
- Age to placement gap. A child eight or older who placed in Level 1 on a completed check and is still there after two weeks of sessions, or eleven or older still at Level 3 or below after two weeks of sessions. A check that was stopped early never counts, and nothing is raised off a single result screen.
- Persistent phonemic awareness difficulty. A child flagged for intensive sound work whose ear work stays under 60 percent across six or more of the last ten sessions.
The note never appears in a family's first week: it needs at least five finished nights across at least seven days, because a pattern takes time to see.
The message recommends a free, formal school evaluation (every U.S. family's right under IDEA Child Find), in plain words, with no diagnosis and no upsell. That is a firewall rule: the escalation message never sells anything.
6. Who scores, and what a machine is never allowed to do
- A person's judgment is the source of truth. Every reading mark in this program is a human decision made by tapping, by the parent for younger readers and by the reader in the self-directed track. No machine ever grades the child's voice into the record; there is no speech recognition anywhere in the checks or the reading.
- Answers are concealed from the child mechanically. In ear work (phonemic awareness), the expected answer is blurred on screen until the adult taps to peek, so a shared tablet cannot leak answers. In dictation the protocol is screen faces the adult, and in the teen's solo mode the dictation target is mechanically hidden behind a blur until the reader chooses to check.
- Practice and measurement are kept distinct. Teaching moments carry scaffolds on purpose: the warm up models a missed sound only after the miss, never before, and word work may show the day's pattern hint while the child practices it. The clean measures are the fluency probes and the level exit gates, which carry no scaffolds.
7. What else is recorded
- Dictation. Marked right or needs a fix per item by the adult, with every miss recycled into spaced review, and a fix it beat immediately after any miss. On probe nights a three word spelling snapshot is recorded separately and never counts toward mastery.
- Retell and comprehension. After the story, a retell moment and a one tap comprehension note (yes, almost, not yet), logged over time in the weekly note as an at home indicator, and labeled exactly that: a simple note, not a formal comprehension test.
- Confidence. A five item reading self concept check in, at most every 60 days, because a child who stops hiding from books is a real outcome too.
How we measure, in the language your school speaks
The full scope and sequence · A sample weekly report · The Auditor’s Bench
For educators, specialists and researchers
The research foundation of A New Page: evidence base and references
The published research, standards and teaching frameworks the program is built on, and exactly how each one shows up in a night.
A note on claims. A New Page is built on and aligned with the methods and standards below. We do not claim that this research tests A New Page itself. No independent study of this program has been run yet. Building that evidence, through pilots and our own measured results, is the work ahead, and we do it in the open.
What we left out on purpose
Families of struggling readers are marketed a lot of things that do not work. So: no “dyslexia fonts,” no colored overlays or tinted lenses, no vision therapy, no “brain training.” None has good evidence for reading. Our larger-text, calmer display is offered for comfort only. And the app never reads your child’s lines for them: a child can tap to hear a word only after trying it.
For specialists: the research base, mapped feature by feature sources and full references
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 discredited 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 includes a minute of phoneme work right after the warm-up (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 written and checked to contain only phoneme, grapheme correspondences and words already taught. Apart from a small set of irregular words we teach explicitly first, 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).
Irregular 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. No whole word is ever memorized as a shape, each irregular word carries a printed reason for its odd part, and the moment that pattern is later taught, the word is reclassified as fully decodable (the ⟲ marks on our scope page). 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. When a new letter-sound is introduced, the program models the blend first, then blends it together with the child, then hands it off to read independently, the I do, we do, you do gradual release of responsibility. 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 and 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. Two standing rules govern every measure: the adult's judgment is always the source of truth (no machine ever grades a child's voice into the record), and the program tells families plainly when home practice is not enough, raising a written professional evaluation flag after sustained flat growth under full program support. The complete written protocol, placement rules, probe scoring, mastery gates, the escalation rule, and the limitations we name on purpose, is public at how we measure.
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, four or five nights, is roughly 60 to 75 minutes a week, in the same range as 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 about 5 to 10 minutes tonight.
Three practical notes from the wider evidence. First, the weekly floor matters most: home-practice research consistently finds that reading gains build when families practice several times a week and stall when practice is sporadic, 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.
- Betts, E. A. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. American Book Company. The origin of the independent, instructional and frustration accuracy bands; our 96 percent reporting bar is a working convention inside the 95 to 98 percent range this tradition uses, not a research finding.
- Treptow, M. A., Burns, M. K., & McComas, J. J. (2007). Reading at the frustration, instructional, and independent levels: The effects on students' reading comprehension and time on task. School Psychology Review, 36(1), 159 to 166.
- 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.
Independent eyes
What reading specialists say
We invited certified tutors, reading therapists and researchers to look at A New Page with real students, and to tell us plainly where it falls short. Their words appear here exactly as written.
“Its genius is simple: the reading is the story. A parent carries the rich adventure aloud, while the child reads the hero’s lines at their exact phonics level. That means the child is not doing drills before the fun starts. Their reading is what moves the plot forward. Every word they read has a purpose.
A New Page is not just another reading app. It is a new category: structured literacy disguised as an adventure, daily intervention disguised as bedtime, and decodable practice that finally feels like a story a child would fight to finish.”
How we collect these. Reviewers get free access and no payment, we ask for honesty rather than praise, every word appears exactly as the reviewer wrote it, and no reviewer’s name appears without their written permission. Criticism that changes the product gets credited too; that is the point.
Our Founding Literacy Advisor
A reading specialist who taught children to read for 41 years: first as a middle school language arts teacher, then as a K-8 reading specialist, and lastly as a second-grade teacher. Word learning, spelling and writing, and the enjoyment of reading were her top goals for her students. She helped shape the standards this program is built on. She has asked us to let the outcome data speak before she puts her name to an endorsement, and we think that is exactly right.
We are inviting certified structured-literacy professionals to look at A New Page with real students. Their honest verdicts, including the criticism, will appear here as they come in.
For specialists: evaluate it yourself in five minutes protocol, scope, sample report, the measurement video
In order: the written measurement and placement protocol (placement stop rules, probe scoring, mastery gates, the nonresponse rule, and the limitations we name on purpose), the full scope and sequence (every step, every pattern, every irregular word by step, generated from the live curriculum data so it cannot drift), a sample weekly report (accuracy, fluency against the Hasbrouck and Tindal 2017 norms, what we tell parents and what we never show children), the Auditor’s Bench (run the decodability firewall over any line yourself), and the two-minute measurement video below. If you would rather try the real thing, the reading check is free with no signup, and the first week of nights is free with just an email.
Our Founding Literacy Advisor is an Orton-based reading specialist. She originally trained in the Spalding Method, a direct line from Dr. Orton’s original work, and the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in this program are the ones she has refined over a lifetime of teaching.
Two minutes on how we measure: baseline probes, weekly curriculum-based measures, national norms, and the report your families can hand you.
What we’ll always be straight with you about
A New Page is a teaching and progress program, not a diagnosis. A dyslexia diagnosis takes a full evaluation by a qualified professional, and if that’s the right next step for your child, we’ll tell you and help you find one.
For a child who is struggling severely, we’re the daily practice that works alongside a specialist, not a replacement for one. And no single program works for every child; we’ll always be honest about that.
What a specialist does, and how we do itSee how one night worksThe full lesson list
What A New Page is
A reading program you do together, at home.
Fifteen minutes a night, side by side, for ages 3 to 18. Your child reads the hero’s lines in a real story, built only from sounds they’ve learned. You read the rest from a script, so you never have to guess what to say.
7 nights free, no card. Then $39 a month for the whole family, or $399 a year.