Sharing: The Case for Making Audiobooks Part of Curriculum | Getting Smart

Audiobooks are a valid listening component, providing rich exposure to sophisticated spoken words in school and at home. We’ve seen evidence of this in the work we do at Tales2go, but wanted to be more rigorous in our approach and have data to support our argument. We contracted with WestEd, a leading educational research nonprofit, to evaluate the use of Tales2go in a San Francisco Bay Area school district.The resulting study was completed in January 2016 and broke new ground by examining the impact of audiobooks on student vocabulary and literacy. The results were noteworthy, indicating Tales2go is a promising literacy tool. It was designed to determine the effect of adding an audiobook listening component to reading instruction, specifically the impact on student vocabulary, reading comprehension and motivation to read.

Source: The Case for Making Audiobooks Part of Curriculum | Getting Smart

I’m always leary of research that just so happens to support the company that paid for the research, but I believe using audio is an overlooked technology. Creating audio is a lot easier than other forms of multimedia, and, if you can handle a robotic voice, audio can be automated.