Successful “Little Planet” program expands its horizons
by Peggy Shaw

Vanderbilt’s multi-award-winning literacy series, Little Planet, has been acquired by the Houghton Mifflin Co. from Nashville’s Little Planet Publishing.

The Little Planet Literacy Series, which was developed by researchers at Vanderbilt’s Learning Technology Center in cooperation with Little Planet Publishing, is a visually oriented CD-ROM program targeted to children in kindergarten through second grade.

Diana Sharp, a Vanderbilt senior research associate who directed development of the Little Planet Literacy Series, said the acquisition will make Little Planet more widely used in elementary school classrooms. “Houghton Mifflin has more outlets for distributing the series,” Sharp said. “We will be able to link to a lot of good trade book literature.”

Houghton Mifflin is the home of such staples of children’s literature as Curious George and Paddington Bear.

In the Little Planet series, in use in 3,000 elementary schools in every state, as well as Canada and Japan, children build on oral language skills while producing their own multimedia and print stories. The CD-ROM series uses animated woodland characters involved in “anchor stories” with substantive themes to capture and retain children’s interest.

“We are thrilled to add the Little Planet Literacy Series to our stable of products,” said Conall Ryan, president and publisher of Houghton Mifflin Interactive, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts-based Houghton Mifflin which will manage Little Planet. “This series was developed with one of the premier educational research institutions and is a strong example of interactive multimedia being applied to early literacy.

“We are looking forward to expanding our relationship with Vanderbilt University’s Learning Technology Center. It will provide us with extremely valuable research, which means we will be able to deliver even better products to the education marketplace in the future.”

Researchers at Vanderbilt’s Cognition and Technology Group, who periodically evaluate the Little Planet software, have found that Little Planet students have routinely outperformed control groups in school studies since 1993.

“Children in the program have shown greater fluency and more complexity in their writing,” Sharp said. “They have also outperformed control classes on overall language scores on the standardized Tennessee Comprehensive Performance Assessment (TCAP).”

In a Nashville-based study last year, for example, Little Planet was used in five schools serving 402 at-risk kindergarten through third-grade students. Researchers found that during spring to fall of 1998, the TCAP reading comprehension scores rose from 27 to 35.3 — a gain of 8.3 points. A 2-point gain is considered to be statistically significant. Students not participating in the project during the same time period in the same schools had a gain of only 1.1 points.

Sharp attributes some of Little Planet’s success to research showing that for children to become successful readers, they must be able to have a firm grasp of how stories work and be able to see a sort of animated vision of a story in their minds. Many children acquire this skill while being read to by a parent at home; but other children who have not had much exposure to books, arrive at school with little or no understanding of story structure.

“They find it difficult to make sense of stories and difficult to recall those stories long enough to think deeply about them or participate in class discussions,” Sharp said. “One thing the Little Planet software allows you to do is to instantly revisit any part of the story while you’re discussing it. And because of that, you can pose much more complex problems to children and provide different levels of support for different children.”

Sharp has also found that Little Planet simply captures children’s interest and creates a sense of community in the classroom. In one story, for example, the Little Planet goes dark and resident animals must join together to search for a favorite character named Glowbird, who has disappeared.

The Little Planet cast of characters, which includes a squirrel, rabbit, pelican and story-telling owl, discover that Glowbird has left because her home was carelessly destroyed. The anchor story was designed to teach elementary school students not only reading, but also the importance of caring for the environment, working together and joining forces to solve problems.

“It’s highly motivating and everyone can be drawn into the story, no matter what their background knowledge, Sharp said. Little Planet has received numerous awards including Technology & Learning magazine’s 1997 Top Winner award and the 1997 CODIE Award given by the Software Publisher’s Association for the best curriculum software for early education. The series has also been a winner of Learning magazine’s Teachers’ Choice Award. Sharp is working on a Little Planet CD-ROM program for third-graders, expected to be available this fall.