Bridges Concept Prep helps students who have difficulty understanding core concepts of academic subject matter by instructing them in the way that builds on each individual’s learning strengths, not weaknesses, and by improving the underlying cognitive abilities most directly related to the specified academic skill. As a result students perform better in the classroom and score better on related highstakes tests.
Students Served
Any student who struggles with core academic content areas may benefit, including English language learners, and urban and rural populations, from elementary grades through high school. In earlier grades Concept Prep is useful as a preparation for more challenging instruction later. The Prep Series may be implemented in the regular classroom or in special help classes with students from different grades.
Expectations
Participants will improve their understanding of core concepts necessary for effective learning in the selected academic skill area, and they will improve underlying cognitive abilities, such as auditory memory, spatial or semantic sequencing, symbolic encoding, or figural transformations, which are required for effective learning of each subject area.
Value
Concept Prep helps students master core concepts for each of the key curricula, thus enabling them to understand new facts and concepts, keep up with regular classroom instruction, and perform better on high-stakes tests.
Student Appeal
Each Concept Prep module engages a student in a different way than ordinary curricula do, by combining all three basic ways of communicating information – figural/concrete, symbolic/notational and semantic/verbal. Students use software technology as well as consumable workbooks to learn core concepts and train specific learning abilities, all in new and stimulating ways.
Exposure
Students participate individually from 15 to no more than 60 minutes per day for up to three times per week, and for as long as 12 weeks, although the intensity and duration of service will vary with each module in the Concept Prep series. The size of the student group supervised by one teacher may vary depending on classroom management preferences. Detailed lesson plans are provided to the teachers who oversee the program.
Activities
Students undertake a variety of computer activities or workbook exercises that engage the learner in ways most compatible with his or her learning style. Activities change from day to day, always correlating to underlying cognitive or perceptual abilities most critical for specific curricular areas, or by building a student’s comprehension of more abstract ideas upon the foundation of previously learned core concepts.
Materials
Concept Prep includes everything the school needs to implement the program, including an instructor’s guide with lesson plans, cognitive ability workbooks, scoring keys, and multi-user computer software.
Staffing
The program is operated under the supervision of a school staff member who is provided with a curriculum guide and instructional plan for each individual module of the Concept Preps. Although no formal training is necessary, the teacher has access to toll-free telephone support to answer questions about program use.
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Math Prep - Grade 4 and up
Students are given greater access to basic math concepts – addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, negative numbers, decimal numbers, fractions, primes, exponents, expressions (order of operations), and solving for unknowns. Thus we attack the common problem of students floundering when the math curriculum turns from memorization of symbolic relations (basic arithmetic facts) to broader application of these relations and to more abstract math concepts.
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Language Prep - Grade 4 and up
Learners need help with the fundamental concepts of sentence structure, the logic of complex sentences, and the construction and comprehension of paragraphs. Language Prep is designed to make these concepts understandable to all students while fostering the reading-writing connection.
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Reading Prep - Grade 4 and up
The underlying concept if reading - left-to-right processing, foundational syntax, and acquisition of basic abstract concepts (vocabulary) - are presented to the learner in concrete form, This is not a substitute for reading instruction but, because most reading instruction assumes these concepts are in place, reading readiness tests do not address them, this posing a diagnostics problem.
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Science Prep - Grade 4 and up Coming Soon
The basic concepts of science and scientific investigation are presented concretely. Scientific method is traced from observation and description through classification and taxonomy, to cause-and-effect relationships and the major variations of scientific explanation, prediction and experimentation. All of this is presented in the concrete form that makes it most easily accessible to all students.
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