QuickStart Learning (QSL) refers to activities that provide a person with prompt changes in behavior. Some have called this eons old practice learning-by-doing. It is a generic category of immediate, efficient behavior change activities. QSL is to learning what instant gratification is to the learner. They define engaged learning. Once the person starts the activity, measurable learning occurs. QSLs increase a learner’s behavior repertoire efficiently, that's one of their common attributes.

QSL activities contrast with discovery learning, whole language reading, and other such efforts that accept extensive trial-and-error behavior as a criterion for a learning process to occur. With QSL, learners do not play hide-and-seek to complete academic tasks, rely on collaborators, stand around while someone else finishes their task, or sit waiting for someone or something to get to the point.

Here’s a sample list of five types of QSL instruction and electronic tools such as software programs used in learning venues, especially PK-20+ schools.

1. QSL Tablet PC Direct Learning Software Programs

MathPractice Starter (publisher authorized free download available)
Displays simpler addition and subtraction problems than its cousin MathPractice, but it also displays objects for each number that users can count in order to determine the answer.

MathPractice (publisher authorized free download available)
Designed for Tablet PCs and other Ink enabled mobile PCs, as you handwrite your work MathPractice recognizes each digit and provides immediate reinforcement as to whether your solution is correct or not. Available in five levels of difficulty from beginners to advanced elementary grades for each of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers.

Revelation Natural Art (Publisher authorized free download available)
Configurable to meet any learner’s specific needs by adding or reducing the number of tools available to make the program as powerful or as simple to use as you wish. The rich range of super realistic natural media effects allows all users to work intuitively with the same tools on the computer that they have already used in their real life Art and Design work: Crayons, Oil Pastels, Pencils, Charcoal, Felt pens, Chalks, Acrylic paints, Poster paints, Watercolor paints, Airbrush sprays.

Tablet PC Music Composition Tool (Publisher authorized free download and tutorial available)
Create and play your own music. Use your Ink pen to write notes on the staff and then play your tune.

FractionPractice (publisher authorized free download available)
Solve problems naturally--just as you would on paper. As you handwrite solutions to problems automatically generated, FractionPractice recognizes your work and provides instant feedback.

TabletFlash 1.1 (publisher authorized free download available)
A flashcard program for use with Tablet PCs, handwrite anything you want on a series of blank cards, record audio hints or answers for each card, and then step through these cards either sequentially or randomly. Supports writing on the back of each card.

2. QSL Programming

Lisp Quickstart
This quickstart is only intended to get you introduced to very basic concepts in Lisp. It's enough to get you up to speed so you can more easily understand a good book (ANSI Common Lisp, etc.)

3. QSL Scientific Procedures

Quick Start Learning Guide for LabColors Cosmetic Dyes
This step by step guide includes hints about mixing cosmetic dyes.

4. QSL Direct Instruction (DI) (the subject of the largest single empirical study of affects of teaching on learning)

Direct Instruction links person-to-person instructional effectiveness to student learning efficiency. DI emphasizes well-developed and carefully planned lessons designed around small learning increments and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks. It eliminates misinterpretations by learners in order to greatly improve and accelerate learning.

A report from the American Institutes for Research for AASA, AFT, NAESP, NASSP and NEA of all schoolwide reform models indicated that 32 of 34 qualifying studies demonstrated a positive effect of Direct Instruction on student achievement .

In addition, DI was reported effective in improving overall achievement plus achievement in language, reading, mathematics, spelling, health and science. Perhaps most interesting, it had a positive effect on these affective behaviors and social skills: self esteem/concept, attitudes toward self and school, attribution of success or failure to self or outside, sense of responsibility and high school success.

See how Gering Public Schools, a small district in northwest Nebraska, closed a 23 percent achievement gap between white and Hispanic students in three years by implementing the full immersion model of Direct Instruction (DI) with NIFDI.

5. Try Another Way (TAW)

An instructor driven process developed by Marc Gold for arranging tasks in ways that a learner has only two choices to meet each learning objective successfully. When the learner chooses the incorrect option, the instructor simply says, “Try another way.” It works with simple and complicated tasks when used with people who have IQ scores ranging from the middle 30s up. One of the first processes to yield objective, empirical data (generated in middle 1970s in Massachusetts) that demonstrated the affect of instructor training on learners’ new behavior acquisition rates.


Well, that's a starter list. I'll add to it and post a QSL Q&A as I have time.

Please use this starter for your own purposes, and let me know of that use, so I can let others know also. And, thanks for your interest. Now, let's increase those student learning rates.

Note: The term QuickStart Learning is not related to any other use of the term quick start.

Tablet PC Education Blog