Newcastle High School

Quality education in a caring environment

Telephone02 4969 3177

Emailnewcastle-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au

QuickSmart Success

tutors and students at three different desks

 

QuickSmart is a theory based, intensive Literacy and Numeracy program developed by the University of New England (UNE) Armidale.

The intervention is called QuickSmart to encourage students to become quick in their response time and smart in their understanding.

The goal of the program is to improve students’ information retrieval times to levels that free working-memory, allowing them to more easily engage in challenging activities.

In Literacy this involves progressively more difficult word recognition and story reading and in numeracy includes basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts.

The program is unique in that it is specifically designed for students in the middle years of schooling of Y5 Y6 Y7 and Y8. At Newcastle High School we have students in both Y7 and Y8 participating.

We are in our fourth year of the Quicksmart program at Newcastle High School and all of our Quicksmart instructors - Mrs Durie, Mrs Bland, Mrs Smith, Miss Standen and Mr Grove - have undergone extensive training from the UNE.

Every year we share our achievement data with the University of New England and this data contributes to the ongoing program research and improvement. We are very proud to have been involved in recent years as the program recently earned recognition of its national impact by the Australian Research Council.

In a recent publication from the university to school principals:

We extend our congratulations to the many hundreds of schools, principals and QuickSmart instructors across Australia who have, through QuickSmart:

  • enabled this powerful acknowledgment of the impact of their efforts and the resulting outcomes to have occurred at a national level; and, more importantly
  • enhanced the life chances of so many tens of thousands of students through greatly improved numeracy and literacy competence, skills and understandings

Quicksmart students, in pairs, attend a 30 minute session 3 times per week for 30 weeks of the year. Every year, we are thrilled to see our students blossom not just in their learning and recall but in their class work, formal assessments, self esteem and general school engagement.

Our schools success in the program is such that the UNE chose Newcastle High School to host schools from across the state for Quicksmart Numeracy training in February this year. We look forward to sharing the ongoing success of this program with the school community and welcome any enquiries.

QuickSmart Overview