Pedagogy

Note: This document is intended as a comprehensive explanation of the pedagogy behind the program. Prospective users who are curious are free to read it. However, reading this full document is not required to use the program. A large part of this research is implemented in a way that is completely transparent to students and tutors. For parts that require explicit introduction, the instruction manual includes concise definitions and instructions on how they are applied.

It is important, however, to establish trust with parents, educators, and other stakeholders by showing that Pictures Are For Babies is grounded on solid research and best practices, not on untested theories, personal hunches, or anecdotal evidence.

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Executive Summary🔗

This summary provides parents, educators, and other interested readers with a quick overview of the program's pedagogy and logic model.

• National and international assessments confirm that literacy instruction is failing at both ends of the distribution. Large numbers of students never reach basic proficiency, and the number of students demonstrating the highest levels of literacy is vanishingly small, with some assessments grouping the top two categories because so few students reach the top one. These assessments test only reading, so the number of students demonstrating the highest levels at both reading and writing is likely even lower.

• Pictures Are For Babies is a literacy software tutor that spans every aspect of literacy from alphabetic knowledge through graduate and professional reading and writing. It is powered by Trane, a deliberate practice engine that schedules, sequences, and tracks every exercise across five integrated tracks. Multi-tiered intervention protocols are built into the program to ensure that students receive the right level of support, and these protocols are designed to be implemented by any fluent reader willing to act as a tutor.

• The scientific consensus on how fluent reading develops is settled, but without a corresponding engineering effort, that consensus has failed to translate into classroom outcomes. An engineering of reading designs solutions from the ground up to solve user problems, anticipates variation across learners and contexts, and makes errors the designer's responsibility rather than the teacher's. Pictures Are For Babies is a comprehensive attempt to put this approach into practice.

• The program's logic model is built on deliberate practice, the framework shown across domains from music to chess to medicine to produce expert performance. Trane automates the conditions for deliberate practice by implementing spaced repetition, interleaving, retrieval practice, and mastery learning. These cognitive science components have empirical support and are integrated with the science of reading and the science of writing into a single coherent system. The program is not an attempt to introduce novel theories, but to integrate and operationalize decades of research into a system that can be implemented at scale.

• A session requires only a tutor, the software, a medium for dictation, and books of the student's choice. Lessons are either reading or dictation, applied across all the curriculum. In a reading lesson the tutor reveals hidden examples and checks whether the student reads them fluently. In a dictation lesson the tutor reads examples aloud while the student writes them down. If the student makes mistakes, the tutor performs an intervention to explicitly teach the material the student missed. Reading breaks let the tutor read aloud from a book of the student's choice, giving them a chance to rest while continuing to develop background knowledge and vocabulary. A new tutor can be trained to use the software in fifteen minutes and on the intervention protocols in a few hours.

• Drawing from Kilpatrick's categorization of reading interventions, the program follows the pattern of the most effective programs ever documented: explicit phonics instruction, phonemic awareness developed to proficiency, and extensive practice in connected text. It extends this pattern of uncompromisingly using the best research to include reading comprehension through building background knowledge and explicit writing instruction from sentences to multiple paragraphs through worked examples.

Logic Model🔗

Problem Statement🔗

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus on the mechanisms that drive reading and writing acquisition, actual instruction often fails to align with its recommendations. Even in programs that align with research, much of its implementation is left to educators, who cannot reach fidelity even with extensive training. The state of literacy instruction is even more dire for struggling students, who require extensive individualized instruction. In the absence of what Elizabeth Tipton and Nicole Patton-Terry call an "engineering of reading", the "science of reading" is no more than a marketing badge that fails to translate to real outcomes even when the programs align with its recommendations.

National and international assessments of literacy confirm that literacy instruction is failing to meet the needs of students. The OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) shows that 28% of adults have low literacy proficiency. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that 26% of students in all member countries score below level 2 in reading, with the United States having 19% of students in this category. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows 32% of 12th graders in the United States scoring below basic in reading.

These figures are often the focus of the discussion, but the results paint a more dire picture when focusing on the highest-performing students. Across all three assessments and all countries, the number of students demonstrating the highest levels of literacy is under 10%, with some assessments grouping the statistics for this group with the next highest level because the number is so small as to be meaningfully reported as its own category. These assessments test only reading performance, so the number of students demonstrating the highest levels at both reading and writing is likely even lower.

Pictures Are for Babies is not designed for mere remediation of low-performing students or to meet some government standard. From its very inception and through every aspect of its design and implementation, it aims to engineer the conditions that make the highest levels of literacy the default for all students that complete it. In light of the continued challenges in achieving these outcomes, this goal might seem impossible. However, as Louisa C. Moats states in her seminal article "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science", "reading failure can be prevented in all but a small percentage of children with serious learning disorders. It is possible to teach most students how to read if we start early and follow the significant body of research showing which practices are most effective".

The rocket science of literacy instruction is mostly settled, but without the corresponding aerospace engineering, the spaceship will not reach its faraway destination. What Tipton and Patton-Terry describe as the "engineering of reading" is an approach that designs solutions from the ground up to solve user problems rather than test hypotheses, to anticipate variation across learners and contexts rather than control for it, to make errors the designer's responsibility rather than the teacher's, and to be refined through iteration rather than validated through a single study.

Unbeknownst to Tipton and Patton-Terry, the author, working independently and without institutional support, was already working on much of what they call for at the time of publication. That this system was built by a single person outside the constraints of mainstream EdTech companies, venture capital, and market-driven consensus is probably not a coincidence.

Logic Model Summary🔗

Pictures Are For Babies is built on a foundation of best-in-class pedagogy, drawing from a multidisciplinary body of research in cognitive science, expert performance, optimal learning, the science of reading, and the science of writing instruction. These disparate fields not only align, but reinforce each other, forming a coherent theoretical and practical framework for effective literacy instruction.

Unfortunately, while the research has been replicated and validated for decades, classroom instruction and most commercial programs are, at best, decades behind, and, at worst, actively hostile to it. Some programs correctly and thoroughly execute parts of the research, but no other program I was able to find integrates all of it into a coherent whole. Before detailing how every aspect of the program is grounded in research, this section presents a high-level summary of the logic model that underpins it, both to provide a short summary for policymakers and educators, and to provide full context for the detailed logic model that follows.

The backbone of the logic model is the program's focus on deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a well-established framework for explaining how individuals acquire expertise in any domain. This framework has been validated in a wide range of domains, from music to chess to sports to medicine. It states that expert performance across any domain is achieved through effortful, structured training with immediate feedback aimed at improving specific aspects of performance. Deliberate practice is not meant to be fun, inherently enjoyable, or easy. Deliberate practice succeeds because it relentlessly targets weaknesses at the edge of current ability and develops the learner's ability to self-monitor and self-correct, and fosters their intrinsic motivation to improve.

Pictures Are For Babies implements deliberate practice through Trane, an engine that creates the conditions for deliberate practice in any domain. It surfaces optimized and personalized exercises based on the learner's past performance, a curriculum designed to target individual skills, and the dependence relationships between these skills. Trane uses many well-established techniques from cognitive science, such as spaced repetition, interleaving, and mastery learning that will be discussed in detail in the next section. Trane was designed from scratch by the creator of Pictures Are For Babies and validated in other fields like music before being applied to literacy instruction. Deliberate practice is not a buzzword or a retrofit, but core to the design and implementation of Pictures Are For Babies.

Existing literacy research and recommendations are well aware of the importance of deliberate practice, but the existing solutions have so far been unable to implement it at scale beyond simple adaptive algorithms and self-paced learning models. Without treating literacy as a complex domain that demands a proper and strict implementation of deliberate practice, it is likely that the number of students that reach the highest levels of literacy will remain very low. Expecting students to reach those levels without it is akin to expecting novice pianists to become concert pianists by publishing graded sheet music but never giving them years of extensive structured practice and feedback.

This paradigm works much better when the instruction and feedback are individualized to the learner. Trane solves the problems of providing individualized instruction at scale. Pictures Are For Babies goes further by implementing a model of reading and writing instruction that is both scientifically grounded and delivered through simple protocols any fluent reader can follow. Through this combination, teachers, parents, and volunteers can provide individualized instruction to students without needing to be experts and without needing to know the prior knowledge of the student. Schools can thus implement both small group and one-on-one instruction without needing to hire additional staff or provide extensive training.

By treating deliberate practice as an engineering problem, Pictures Are For Babies is able to implement and enforce the science of reading and writing instruction in a way that is impossible for human instructors and printed materials to do. For example, by keeping track of the performance of every word lesson, the software can identify when a student should receive a higher tier intervention and alert the tutor. While a teacher might be able to identify that a student is struggling, Pictures Are For Babies can perform this analysis with precise performance data and at the lesson level on a word curriculum that spans over 17,500 words. In another example, the concept of Scarborough's reading rope explains how the many different skills that contribute to literacy acquisition are interdependent and interact. Many products pay lip service to this concept but fail to implement it in practice. In Pictures Are For Babies, the concept is implemented without any human intervention because Trane makes sure that the exercises shown to the student come from a variety of courses and lessons testing different skills. Many more of these examples will be discussed in the next section.

Beyond allowing for implementing and enforcing the science of reading and writing instruction, Trane also allows Pictures Are For Babies to implement a curriculum that is far more extensive than any other program and to thoroughly adhere to the science without fear that it will require large amounts of effort on the part of the tutor. The curriculum of Pictures Are For Babies covers every aspect of literacy, namely:

• A symbols track that teaches alphabetic knowledge and knowledge of basic punctuation and symbols.
• A words track that teaches word-level reading and writing. By having Trane take care of spaced review and interleaving, the words track can cover over 17,500 words with a simple intervention protocol that does not require the tutor to have any knowledge of linguistic concepts, detailed scripts, or lesson plans. The only requirements for a tutor are to be a fluent reader, the phonetic skills all fluent readers possess, and the willingness to learn and follow this simple protocol.
• A sentences track that teaches sentence-level reading and spelling and implicitly introduces syntax and grammar. Each sentence course follows a corresponding word course and is designed to reinforce the words learned in that course.
• A reading comprehension track that teaches reading comprehension through a combination of reading a large variety of texts of many types, genres, and topics and developing the background knowledge necessary to understand them. The texts in this track are carefully selected and annotated with example questions for the tutor and footnotes that provide additional context and background knowledge.
• A writing track that teaches writing by having students study and analyze worked examples of explicit writing instruction exercises at the sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph level. Each writing course follows a corresponding reading comprehension course and its material is derived from the texts in that course to further reinforce it. Writing production is outside the scope of the deliberate practice framework for reasons explained in the next section, but tutors can use the writing exercises to provide writing production practice and feedback to students.

In terms of adherence to the science of reading and writing instruction, Pictures Are For Babies follows all the standard recommendations for literacy instruction. These choices are thoroughly explained in the next section, but a few examples include:

• Systematic and explicit instruction of alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness, and phonics.
• Teaching spelling along with reading to reinforce each other.
• Reading comprehension instruction based on the simple view of reading by teaching decoding and language comprehension skills.
• Explicit writing instruction that teaches students how to write at the sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph level.

In order to create a system that engineers the conditions for expert literacy performance in most students, it is necessary to consider the needs of every student. For the lowest-performing, the scientific base has shown that reading difficulties mostly stem from deficits in phonological processing, and that with early and adequate intervention, over 90% of students can achieve grade-level reading proficiency. By focusing its multi-tiered word course intervention protocol on developing the required phonological processing skills, Pictures Are For Babies helps the students with deficits in this area. For students with deficits in other areas, professionals can use Pictures Are For Babies to provide individualized instruction and deliberate practice while they focus on delivering the specific interventions that these students require.

For average students, Pictures Are For Babies ensures that any gap in skills is addressed before it becomes a larger academic problem. High-performing students, who are often neglected by existing group instruction, can use the scalable individualized instruction to continue to develop their skills without regard to grade levels and without worrying that the cost of this level of instruction will siphon resources away from other students. In this way, Pictures Are For Babies can serve as a universal literacy intervention that handles the needs of all students, from those with learning and phonological deficits to the highest-performing group.

Inputs and Activities🔗

Having described the problem and the logic model, this section details the inputs and activities involved in Pictures Are For Babies by describing how a study session is conducted. Apart from the student, the tutor is the most important input to the program. Tutors are tasked with operating the software (thus removing the cognitive load of operating it from the student), checking off the examples that the student mastered in every lesson, conducting interventions when the student misses answers, and conducting reading breaks when the student is frustrated or bored. Apart from the tutor, student, and the software, the only other inputs are a medium for the student to take dictation and books of the student's choice for reading breaks.

The main activity is conducting lessons, which are of two types: reading and dictation. In a reading lesson, the screen presents the tutor with multiple hidden examples of material. The tutor reveals each example, asks the student to read it aloud, and checks off whether the student read it fluently. The criteria for fluency differ slightly depending on the material, but in general, the student is to read the material accurately and to start reading fluently within one second of seeing it. Longer material adds additional criteria, such as reading with appropriate prosody and phrasing and comprehension checks. In a dictation lesson, the tutor is again presented with hidden examples. The tutor makes sure the student cannot see the examples, reveals each example, and reads it aloud to the student. The student is to write down what they hear, and the tutor checks off whether the student wrote it down correctly and fluently. Dictation lessons are not handwriting lessons, so students can use any medium to write down the examples, and younger students can vocally spell the answers.

Before moving to the next lesson, the tutor performs an intervention if the student missed any examples. The specifics of the intervention depend on the material and type of lesson, but they generally focus on explicitly teaching the student the material they missed. The more complicated word intervention protocol has multiple tiers that are triggered on repeated difficulty and involve procedures that train the student's phonological processing skills. Warnings for these higher-tier interventions are surfaced in the user interface so that tutors do not have to wonder when to perform them. Tutors may also initiate them proactively if they already know the student needs the extra practice.

These two types of lessons are applied to the five tracks of the program: symbols, words, sentences, reading comprehension, and writing, with dictation lessons only being used in the first three tracks. In this way, the program implements a complete literacy curriculum that covers every aspect of literacy without ever resorting to superfluous activities that do not match their real-world counterparts.

The second activity in the program is the reading break. Given the requirements of deliberate practice and the lack of pictures and gamification, students can understandably become frustrated or bored with the program. Instead of offering them an unrelated activity or game, the tutor and student can decide together to take a break. During this break, the tutor reads aloud a book of the student's choice, ideally letting the student follow their finger as they track it on the page. After the break, the tutor and student can decide to continue with the lesson or end the session. Because of Trane, the session continues right where they left off.

Detailed Logic Model🔗

This section details the research and evidence that underpins the design and implementation of Pictures Are For Babies. It is organized into multiple sections for each of the fields that inform the program's design, and each section shows a principle from the research followed by an explanation of how Pictures Are For Babies implements it. For simplicity, Pictures Are For Babies will be referenced as PAFB in the rest of this section. Trane is the name of the practice engine that powers PAFB.

Cognitive Science🔗

• Learning and immediate performance are not the same. Immediate performance in a task is not a guarantee of long-term retention or transfer of that skill.

  • PAFB asks students to repeat the same task multiple times at optimal intervals. Mastered exercises are shown occasionally to make sure foundational skills remain solid.

• Working memory is the type of memory used for immediate performance. This type of memory is very limited in capacity and duration. Any type of instruction that requires working memory incurs a cognitive load that must be effectively managed.

  • PAFB follows this principle in many ways. For example, it scaffolds exercises to ensure only a small amount of new information is introduced at a time, uses a simple UI to minimize distractions, and does not teach complicated phonic rules by name.

• Just like working memory, attention is limited and must be guided.

  • PAFB uses a simple UI to minimize distractions. The sessions include explicit instructions to take breaks to replenish attention. Instructions guide students to focus on the correct aspects of literacy and avoid activities not backed by research.

• In contrast, long-term memory has a vast capacity and retains information for long periods of time. Complicated tasks are performed by moving building blocks to long-term memory. Very complex skills like literacy involve repeated instances of this process.

  • PAFB starts at the very beginning with learning to read and write single letters and very basic words. Once they are in long-term memory, sentences and more complex words are introduced. Then real texts and writing tasks are introduced in increasing levels of complexity.

• Subconscious processes do not require active effort and are performed much faster than tasks that require it. Moving information to long-term memory enables the skills to become automatic and free working memory and attention to work on more advanced skills.

  • Trane supports this process by providing spaced review and gating of progress until mastery of easier skills is proven. Together with the scaffolded lessons, it supports the process of turning new skills into automatic habits.

Expert Performance🔗

• Deliberate practice is the essence of expert performance. It is effortful, structured training with immediate feedback aimed at improving specific aspects of performance. It is not meant to be fun, inherently enjoyable, or easy.

  • PAFB uses Trane to primarily surface exercises at the edge of the student's current abilities. The lessons break literacy into small skills and students receive immediate feedback on their performance.

• Experts continually seek to improve their performance instead of falling into automatic patterns.

  • Trane is always gently pushing students past their current edge of ability. Over time, students build on their current skills until they master more and more difficult ones.

• Experts organize skills into large chunks to process complicated information faster.

  • Trane allows skills to be split into smaller skills and to explicitly encode the relationships among them. As students progress through this connected graph, they are given tasks that require that they build these mental structures to demonstrate mastery.

• Expert performers engage in self-regulated learning, setting specific goals, monitoring progress, and adjusting strategies when necessary.

  • Trane tracks learner performance and adapts exercise difficulty accordingly. Tutors can guide students toward deliberate strategy use, especially when progress stalls.

• Experts possess strong metacognitive skills, allowing them to reflect on their performance and make effective adjustments.

  • PAFB trains students to identify confusion and rely on tutors to clarify misunderstandings, building foundational metacognitive habits early.

• Motivation plays a critical role in sustaining the effort required for long-term improvement.

  • Trane and the PAFB tutor model aim to foster intrinsic motivation by tying progress directly to increased competence and ensuring a clear sense of purpose in all tasks.
  • The manual allows the tutor to make use of reading breaks in which they read interesting texts to the student when they detect frustration or boredom. These reading breaks allow students to relax while reinforcing their love of literacy and developing their background knowledge and vocabulary.

• Experts develop flexible, adaptable skills that allow them to transfer knowledge across situations while still relying on deep domain-specific knowledge.

  • Trane’s graph structure allows students to master discrete skills and apply them in increasingly varied contexts, from decoding novel words to understanding complex texts and expressing themselves in writing.

• Early advantages and perceived talent are not predictive of long-term outcomes. Students who appear "gifted" early on often plateau without the right kind of input, while those who build strong foundations through sustained, structured, and deliberate practice eventually surpass them.

  • PAFB produces this kind of quality input for all students, regardless of initial ability. It does not cater to "gifted" early learners or the fastest students. Instead, it supports all students, providing the same rigor, structure, and opportunities for growth. The only difference is individual pace, adjusted based on mastery, not superficial measurements of early ability. Excellence is developed over years, not discovered or accelerated in a race for early achievement.

Optimal Learning🔗

• Mastery learning ensures that students do not progress until they have demonstrated mastery of the current material. This prevents gaps from accumulating and supports long-term growth.

  • Trane automatically withholds access to more difficult material until the student has demonstrated consistent success with prerequisite skills. Mastery is based on performance, not on completion.

• Spaced repetition improves retention by revisiting material in optimal intervals, just before it is forgotten.

  • Trane uses time-aware review scheduling to resurface lessons at optimal intervals based on each student’s history, ensuring long-term retention without overloading them with review.

• Retrieval practice is the act of recalling information from memory, and it has been shown to be more effective than reviewing material or taking notes. The act of trying to recall information strengthens memory and highlights gaps in knowledge.

  • All PAFB exercises are a form of retrieval practice. Students are first asked to recall how individual words are read and spelled. Higher level tasks require recall of individual words, background knowledge, word meaning, and text structures.

• Interleaving different types of tasks strengthens retention and transfer by forcing students to repeatedly retrieve and distinguish between skills.

  • PAFB implements interleaving through randomized review selection and frequent alternation between decoding, spelling, sentence writing, and comprehension tasks.

• Mixing tasks of varying difficulty improves engagement and learning efficiency. Too much difficulty leads to failure and too much ease leads to stagnation.

  • Trane surfaces a blend of easier and harder tasks based on the student’s performance scores, maintaining an optimal difficulty range for learning.

• Implicit repetition strengthens learning by increasing practice on related tasks when a student struggles, and decreasing practice when a student does well.

  • Trane implements a reward system. When a student performs well, simpler and related skills are given a positive reward so that they are practiced less often. When a student performs badly, related, more complicated skills are given a negative reward so that they are practiced more often.

• Flow is a state of deep concentration and enjoyment that occurs when a task's difficulty is well-matched to the learner’s current skill level. It is characterized by sustained focus, loss of self-awareness, and high intrinsic motivation.

  • PAFB and Trane use all the strategies above to best match the exercises to the student's current abilities. Flow is the result of implementing optimal learning strategies, not of turning learning into gamified experiences or hacking motivation.

• Accelerating the timeline for mastering a complex skill is possible, but only under specific conditions. True acceleration does not come from gamification, shortcuts, or early advantages. Instead, it comes from compressing high-quality training into tighter timelines through feedback, gradually increasing complexity, and modeling expert performance.

  • Similarly to how PAFB achieves flow, acceleration is not a goal in itself, but the result of implementing optimal learning strategies, combining them with the best reading pedagogy, and a deep and wide curriculum that progressively exposes learners to all aspects of literacy.

The Science of Reading: Word and Sentence Reading and Writing🔗

• Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. Phonemic awareness is a more specific skill involving the ability to isolate and work with individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound.

  • PAFB builds these skills from the beginning. Students learn to hear and manipulate sounds in words before mapping them to letters.

• Most reading difficulties are caused by weaknesses in phonological processing, not vision or motivation. Students who cannot hear, segment, or manipulate sounds will struggle to decode and map words into memory.

  • PAFB targets these core deficits directly. Every word and sentence lesson includes tasks that strengthen the phonological system and link it to written language. No guessing strategies or visual cueing systems are used.

• Orthographic mapping is the central process that allows readers to store words in memory for instant recognition. It links the pronunciation, spelling, and meaning of words, and depends on phonemic awareness and letter–sound knowledge. Without successful orthographic mapping, students will not become fluent readers, no matter how much they are exposed to print.

  • PAFB's lessons on words and sentences are built on this concept. Tutors are instructed to mark words and sentences as mastered only when reading and writing are effortless and automatic.
  • Trane ensures that progress is gated behind accurate mapping of the words, not on mere decoding or guessing.

• Orthographic mapping should extend beyond simple words to include irregular spellings, multisyllabic words, and morphologically complex forms. Fluent reading requires rapid retrieval of tens of thousands of words, including those not easily decoded by rule.

  • PAFB is designed to support deep orthographic mapping. The system introduces increasingly complex word forms only after foundational skills are in place and goes all the way to ensure students master words needed to proficiently read undergraduate and graduate material.
  • The word curriculum of PAFB covers over 17,500 unique words. Through repeated exposure to real texts in more advanced courses, their vocabulary continues to grow beyond the words explicitly taught.

• The self-teaching hypothesis posits that once a student develops efficient decoding skills, successive encounters with new words allow them to apply their existing knowledge to map them in long-term memory with fewer trials. Through this process, fluent readers develop a sight vocabulary that contains tens of thousands of words.

  • PAFB supports this process by providing ample opportunities for students to encounter words in varied contexts, promoting deeper understanding and retention, and enabling generalization of spelling patterns. As students progress through the word curriculum, they steadily use their previous knowledge to expand their sight vocabulary.
  • Unlike the raw application of the hypothesis, PAFB does not leave this to chance. The curriculum and the practice engine ensure students efficiently develop a large sight vocabulary.

• With proper instruction that targets phonemic skills and supports orthographic mapping, the vast majority of children can learn to read proficiently. Research estimates that 90 to 95 percent of children can reach grade-level reading ability with effective interventions.

  • PAFB is built on the methods shown to produce these outcomes. By addressing phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and comprehension in the correct order, it ensures that reading failure is not treated as inevitable, but as preventable.

• A hallmark of the most successful interventions is teaching phonemic awareness to proficiency in students that exhibit persistent reading difficulties, including tasks like phoneme deletion, substitution, and reversal. These skills are essential for supporting orthographic mapping and are often missing in students with persistent reading difficulties.

  • PAFB gives explicit instructions on how and when to address deficits in phonemic awareness with these advanced tasks.

• Research supports a tiered model of instruction, where all students receive core instruction and only those who struggle are given additional support.

  • PAFB follows this model closely. Every student receives explicit, structured lessons, but when a student struggles with a task, additional instruction and targeted phonemic work are introduced. This ensures that time is spent efficiently and support is provided only where needed.
  • PAFB uses the student's performance data to determine when to suggest these higher tier interventions and shows a graphical warning.

• Phonics is essential for teaching how letters represent sounds, but it is not enough to produce fluent readers. Letter-sound knowledge must lead to permanent connections between sounds, spellings, and meanings.

  • PAFB uses phonics to organize instruction and support orthographic mapping, but does not teach rules explicitly. Concepts like vowel types or syllable labels are avoided to reduce cognitive load. Every word, regular or irregular, is taught by mapping its phonemes to its spelling, and no word is ever treated as an unbreakable whole to be memorized.

• Phonemic awareness instruction works better when it is integrated with phonics instruction, not as standalone units that precede phonics instruction by months or years. On the other hand, some like Kilpatrick argue that introducing letters too early can interfere with phonemic awareness development.

• PAFB solves the tension between these two positions by teaching phonemic awareness first followed by teaching the mapping of letters to sounds within the same lesson. That way, both skills are developed in parallel while allowing the tutors to notice deficits in phonemic awareness.

• The higher tiers of the intervention model are designed to address these deficits, and tutors are instructed to only use sounds and tokens in deletion, substitution, and reversal tasks. Without the use of letters in these tasks, students are forced to rely entirely on their phonemic awareness skills.

• Reading and spelling are two sides of the same process, each reinforcing the other. Spelling is more difficult because it demands exact recall of letter sequences.

  • PAFB treats spelling as a core component of literacy. Each word and sentence reading lesson is followed by a lesson where students must correctly write the words or sentences from the tutor's dictation.

• Word-level spelling develops along a predictable path. Early attempts are phonetic but imprecise. Over time, students learn to spell words more accurately by internalizing common letter patterns and morphological endings.

  • PAFB follows this trajectory deliberately. Students begin with simple one-syllable words and progress toward irregular spellings and affixed forms once the foundations are secure.

• Sentence-level reading and writing introduce new challenges. Students must coordinate multiple word forms, apply grammar, and maintain fluency.

  • PAFB begins sentence work only after students can reliably decode and spell the words involved. Sentences are used to reinforce word reading in context and to teach syntax and grammar through reading and taking dictation.

The Science of Reading: Comprehension🔗

• The Simple View of Reading defines reading comprehension as the product of two components: decoding and linguistic comprehension. If either is weak, comprehension will suffer.

  • PAFB ensures decoding is fully mastered before comprehension is emphasized. Real texts are only introduced after the student can reliably read and spell all the words involved.
  • PAFB tackles linguistic comprehension by annotating texts with footnotes and briefings, with tutors available to cover any gap.

• Most comprehension problems in struggling readers are caused by poor word reading, not poor reasoning.

  • PAFB follows this principle by focusing early instruction on decoding, spelling, and syntax. Comprehension tasks are introduced only after students can fluently access the text.

• Vocabulary and background knowledge are critical predictors of comprehension. Readers must know the meaning of the words and the context behind the ideas they are reading.

  • PAFB includes a wide range of text types to develop both vocabulary and domain knowledge. Students are exposed to literature, nonfiction, poetry, essays and more, curated and leveled to support gradual knowledge growth.

• Skilled readers construct a mental model of the text by integrating ideas across sentences. This process depends on decoding, vocabulary, working memory, and attention.

  • PAFB supports this process through carefully leveled texts. As students progress, the texts become longer and more conceptually demanding, giving them practice with sustained reading and inference-making.

• Good readers monitor their comprehension as they read and notice when something does not make sense.

  • PAFB trains students to say “I don’t know” when confused. Tutors are instructed to stop, clarify, and re-read as needed, helping students develop this metacognitive skill.

• Comprehension monitoring is a metacognitive strategy in which readers notice when a text stops making sense and resolve the issue by rereading, asking questions, clarifying their interpretations, and identifying gaps in background knowledge.

  • PAFB uses this approach by having tutors use this strategy when the tutor suspects the student is not comprehending the material. They pretend not to understand the text and ask the student to help them along their lines of questioning.

The Science of Writing🔗

• Reading and writing reinforce each other. Reading builds the vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge that writing draws on, while writing strengthens understanding of how texts are structured, and exercises word and sentence reading and spelling skills.

  • PAFB treats reading and writing as interdependent skills. Each level of text reading courses is followed by a writing course that introduces students to increasingly complex composition tasks.

• Writing is not a natural skill. It must be taught explicitly, in a structured progression, beginning with sentence construction and extending toward paragraphs and full texts.

  • PAFB and Trane are built on small and repeatable exercises that are easily verifiable by a tutor. Writing production tasks do not fit this mold. They cannot be repeated many times without boring students, take much longer than reading and spelling tasks, and have open-ended answers that would require more training and effort from the tutor.
  • This problem is solved by turning writing production tasks into reading tasks. Instead of asking students to solve writing tasks, PAFB's writing track shows students how expert writers tackle the problems by having them read the problem and the solution.
  • The strategy makes the exercises repeatable, shorter, and removes their open-ended nature. Writing production tasks must be undertaken outside the program. PAFB supports production by exposing students to the same type of tasks and letting tutors use the writing questions as a starting point for their own production tasks.

• Worked examples are a powerful tool for teaching in a variety of subjects, as they provide students with a clear model of how to approach problems that they can then generalize and emulate.

  • Including writing production tasks in PAFB would have been ideal, but the decision to turn these tasks into reading of worked examples is not without precedent. The evidence shows that worked examples can be more effective than problem-solving, especially for novice learners.

• Writing instruction is most effective when directly tied to reading content. Disconnected prompts do not build transferable skills. The content of the curriculum drives the rigor of the writing activity.

  • Whenever possible, PAFB links each writing task to the texts from the previous reading comprehension course. The model answers reuse the vocabulary and ideas from those texts, helping students internalize structure and content together.
  • As the texts become more complex, so do the writing tasks associated with them.

• Students must learn to write complete sentences before they can write meaningful paragraphs or essays.

  • PAFB includes exercises that train students on how to clearly construct sentences, showing them how to use conjunctions, appositives, transitions and other tools to construct and combine sentences.

• Writing tasks at the paragraph and text level must be addressed after sentence-level writing. The two most important phases of the writing process are planning and revising.

  • PAFB teaches planning by showing examples of structured outlines that make the structure of writing visible and teach students how writers organize their ideas.
  • Revising exercises show students how writers revise their output. The exercises show an initial paragraph or sentence in need of revision, list all the changes made by the writer, and show the revised writing.

• Grammar and mechanics should be taught in the context of actual writing and not through isolated drills.

  • PAFB teaches concepts like conjunctions, transitions, and relative pronouns by showing how they are used to build complete sentences and contrasting how several of them are used at a time.

Research and Implementation Gaps in Other Literacy Programs🔗

Competing literacy programs often fail to incorporate all of these findings comprehensively or correctly, if at all. Rather than naming specific competitors and their shortcomings, this section focuses on the main misalignments between the pedagogy outlined in the previous sections and mainstream offerings. Parents and educators armed with this knowledge should be able to properly evaluate literacy programs and recognize those that truly align with best practices.

Cognitive Science, Expert Performance, and Optimal Learning🔗

• Most programs make no attempt to incorporate findings from cognitive science, expert performance, or optimal learning. Concepts like spaced repetition, retrieval practice, or mastery learning are mostly ignored. Instead, tasks are selected based on teacher's judgement or linear curriculums that fail to schedule review and new material at optimal times.
• Even advanced programs that claim to follow these principles rarely follow them to their full extent, settling for simple implementations that only implement parts of the research.
• These are not minor omissions. They are a complete failure to build instruction on best practices.

Science of Reading: Word and Sentence Reading and Writing🔗

• Most programs teach phonics but ignore orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. They encourage memorization of entire words, isolated rule drills, or guessing via context clues with no structured process to link sounds, spellings, and meanings in memory.
• Programs treat decoding as the criterion for success rather than fluent and effortless reading and writing. By doing so, they can hide reading difficulties in the short term and help students develop coping mechanisms that mask their struggles. In the long term, students with reading difficulties will hit a wall once texts become too difficult, abstract, and the pictures go away. This is a well-known phenomenon known as the fourth-grade slump.
• Phonemic awareness is treated as a warm-up activity or skipped altogether. Few programs include more complex tasks like phoneme deletion, substitution, or reversal. These tasks provide the additional practice that struggling readers need and are a hallmark of the most effective interventions, as categorized by David Kilpatrick.
• Spelling is often treated as separate from reading or not addressed at all. As a result, students are unable to internalize spelling patterns or apply them automatically.
• Sentence and text reading and spelling are introduced too early or not at all. Without a foundation of proper orthographic mapping, students will spend too many cognitive resources in word decoding and struggle with higher level tasks.

Science of Reading: Comprehension🔗

• Comprehension tasks are introduced before decoding is fluent, causing students to struggle with word recognition and forcing them to compensate through maladaptive strategies.
• Most programs rely on introducing comprehension strategies rather than building the required background knowledge. These strategies are taught in isolation, without attention to vocabulary, syntax, or background knowledge, and without any relation to the materials students are reading.
• Vocabulary and background knowledge are not systematically developed. Texts are leveled to reduce decoding complexity and not to build knowledge. Students are left unprepared to tackle real academic texts in later grades when the focus shifts from learning to read to reading to learn.

Science of Reading: Composition and Syntax🔗

• Writing instruction centers around open-ended prompt instead of explicit and structured instruction at the sentence, paragraph, and multi-paragraph levels. As a result, students are asked to write before they know how to build the basic blocks of writing.
• Writing is disconnected from reading and their writing tasks do not reuse vocabulary or content from the texts they are reading in and outside class. Such programs fail to take advantage of the synergy between reading and writing instruction.
• Planning and revision are not taught explicitly, students are rarely shown how to structure a paragraph before writing, and revision is treated as fixing errors rather than improving how to present and support ideas.
• Grammar is either not taught or reduced to rote instruction instead of being integrated in writing instruction. Students might acquire some grammatical knowledge but lack the mental model and practice for how to apply it in real writing tasks.

Partial Alignment🔗

• Some programs incorporate parts of the research correctly. Some focus on early phonemic awareness and decoding. Others emphasize orthographic mapping, structured writing, or background knowledge. However, these components are usually not integrated into a complete system.
• Even when the curriculum is perfectly designed and aligned with research, it is still the responsibility of teachers to plan lessons without the tools to track group and individual performance to select optimal exercises in ways aligned with best practices.

Some of the programs that meet partial alignment are listed below, along with the pieces they properly implement. Unlike the rest of the programs, these have made a concerted effort to align with the principles outlined in the previous sections, so deserve to be mentioned by name.

• Heggerty: Phonemic awareness instruction to the advanced level.
• Equipped for Reading Success: Advanced phonemic awareness in support of orthographic mapping, designed to capture the effects of the highly successful clinical interventions (LiPS, Phono-Graphix, Discover Reading) without requiring specialized clinical training.
• Core Knowledge: Developing the background knowledge and vocabulary necessary for comprehension.
• The Writing Revolution: Evidence-based writing instruction.

Annotated Bibliography🔗

Books🔗

The pedagogy outlined in Pictures Are For Babies is largely derived from the books below. They shaped its design and sequencing from the very beginning and were not used as mere validation. Books were preferred over individual journal articles because they provide a more comprehensive and integrated view of the research that is difficult for an outside researcher to gain from individual articles.

• Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R., Kozbelt, A., & Williams, A. M. (Eds.). (2018). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

  • The definitive reference on deliberate practice and expert performance. Informed Trane's design as a deliberate practice engine and the program's focus on mastery through effortful, structured training with immediate feedback.

• Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2024). The Writing Revolution 2.0: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. Jossey-Bass.

  • The basis for the program's writing track. Informed the worked-examples approach, sentence-level to paragraph-level progression, and integration of writing with reading content.

• Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Wiley.

  • Synthesizes research on orthographic mapping, advanced phonemic awareness, and intervention effectiveness. Informed the tiered word-level intervention protocol.

• Snowling, M. J., Hulme, C., & Nation, K. (Eds.). (2022). The Science of Reading: A Handbook (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

  • Comprehensive reference on the science of reading. Informed the program's approach on phonological awareness, decoding, comprehension, and reading difficulties.