Trane

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Trane?
  • Trane is the deliberate practice engine that powers Pictures Are For Babies. It uses the structure of the curriculum and the student's past performance to select each personalized and optimized lesson while handling scheduling, mastery, and review.
• What is deliberate practice?
  • Deliberate practice is repeated and structured practice that aims to improve performance of individual skills. Experts in disciplines like music, chess, and sports use this type of practice and its related strategies to reach the top of their fields. Trane applies them automatically to literacy instruction.
• How does Trane personalize each lesson?
  • Every time the tutor scores a completed lesson, Trane updates its recommendations using the student's performance and the relationships within the curriculum. It determines what the student is ready to learn, what still needs work, and what should be reviewed.
• Is there a software to learn to read and write based on deliberate practice?
  • Yes. Pictures Are For Babies uses Trane to manage the complete path from learning individual letters to reading and writing at the level required in graduate and professional schools.
• Do tutors need to understand deliberate practice to use Pictures Are For Babies?
  • No. Trane implements all the strategies in the background. The tutor teaches each lesson, scores the student's performance, and requests the next one. Trane handles the sequencing, pacing, and review.
• Does Trane replace the human tutor?
  • No. Trane automates lesson planning so that the tutor can focus on teaching, providing feedback, and giving the student emotional and social support.

Pictures Are For Babies teaches reading and writing using the same strategies that produce world-class experts, all at the click of a button

Pictures Are For Babies is powered by Trane, a deliberate practice engine for optimizing the acquisition of complex skills. Every time the student completes a lesson and the tutor asks for a new one, Trane uses the structure of the curriculum and the student's past performance to select a new personalized and optimized lesson. The tutor becomes free from the need to schedule lessons and can focus on what humans do best: teaching, providing feedback, and giving emotional and social support.

Trane is based on the principle of deliberate practice, structured practice that aims to improve performance of individual skills through repetition and immediate feedback. This type of practice and the strategies following it are used by experts in disciplines like music, chess, and sports to reach the top of their fields. When applied to literacy instruction, Trane allows for the following:

• Ensuring that students never progress past material they have not mastered, preventing any small gaps from snowballing into serious academic issues.
• Allowing for tracking fluency of individual word lessons and warning tutors when the student could use a more intensive intervention. These interventions have been shown to remediate the most common cause of word-level reading difficulties.
• Mixing lessons of different types and levels of mastery, which produces more durable learning than blocked practice and prevents extremes of boredom or frustration.
• Reviewing current material at optimal intervals and allowing it to move to long-term memory.
• Reducing the need to review redundant material. For example, a mastered dictation lesson prevents its corresponding reading lesson from having to be reviewed again.
• And most of all, allowing for all the skills needed to fully master reading and writing to be modeled as a single coherent system over a vast curriculum. Pictures Are For Babies can be the first and last program in a child's literacy education.

For general information about Trane, please visit the official website.