Essential Skills

Programs for learning elementary subjects;widely used in RTI/special ed

Overview

Essential Skills programs provide individualized, comprehensive basic skills instruction for a series of elementary-grade subjects: reading/language arts (K-6), math (K-6), science (1-3), geography (3-5), and English language learning.

Skills are taught and practiced in a logical and sequential manner with appropriate reward and reinforcement to continuously engage learners. These programs focus on teaching skills in a step-by-step manner to develop academic self-confidence for all learners regardless of ability level. All programs include a variety of auditory, visual and tactile activities to reinforce concepts for all learning modalities.

Teachers have the option of assigning program assessments to further individualize instruction for each student depending on learning needs, which makes Essential Skills useful for for intervention and remediation. It is also widely used with special ed and Title I students.

The company website includes evaluations of Essential Skills from a faculty member at Queens University, teachers in the U.S. and Canada, and a Masters student, all suggesting that the software-based program has performed well in improving student outcomes.

As of February 2013, the company reported that over 400,000 students across 20,000+ schools are using its products.