FrontRead to help students in Aarhus improve their reading

More than a 50 percent increase in reading speed is what the students in Aarhus has to look forward to after the municipality decided to purchase FrontRead licenses for every municipal primary and lower secondary school in the city.

The students in Aarhus Municipality will now receive help to improve their reading fluidity and text comprehension. The municipality recently purchased FrontRead for every school, thus granting every student in Aarhus an opportunity to put the digital teaching aid to good use from the beginning of the school year.

Encouraging the students to push themselves

News about the purchase has been a cause of excitement at the schools.

“I think that’s very good news,” Lars Peter Tolsgaard, teacher and reading counsellor at Gammelgaardskolen in Aarhus said. “It’s exercises for reading are done in a different way than we normally would, and most students find that very motivating.”

According to Lars Tolsgaard, FrontRead focuses on reading and what reading is on a concrete level. That increases the students consciousness concerning strategies and reading techniques – and shows that how you approach your material matters and that it is not meaningless what you read.

At the same time, the students also become more aware of their bad reading habit. For example by better sensing whether they read things out with an inner voice and learning how to zone that voice out so it does not slow down their reading speed.

“For a lot of our students it pushes to some things. It has an influence on their reading speed and fluency and it has an influence on how they approach reading, especially academical material,” Lars Tolsgaard said. “In that way I think it is really positive and a good tool – among many – for reading.”

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Improves reading ability

Exercising with FrontRead may help the students in Aarhus improve their reading speed and become more motivated. Furthermore, results show that the students also get better grades.

“The students increased their reading grade by an average of one entire point,” Merete B. Riedel, CDO at Frontread said. ”And that is just the beginning: In cooperation with (removed “especially”) Aarhus Municipality and Aarhus University we have already begun developing further so we can unlock even greater potential in our program.”

25 years of experience in a new digital package

FrontRead is a unique online training course, aimed at training students reading fluidity and text comprehension and helps improve their reading strategies. More than 65.000 students have used FrontRead already and have been able to show an average increase in reading speed of more than 50 percent.

“The concept of FrontRead builds on my experiences and methods from more than 25 years of teaching adult readers in efficient information handling,” Merete B. Riedel said.

“The methods and teachings have been transferred into FrontRead’s digital program, allowing us to start training reading speed and comprehension as soon as the end of primary school. By working on an increased awareness concerning reading processes as early as possible we help the students familiarise themselves with academical reading at an early age – and we are happy that every student attending the schools in Aarhus will now have access to this training.”