Life Skills for a Brighter Future ™
Welcome to Brighten Learning your source for teaching social skills, life skills and career readiness. Our unique animated programs are engaging, interactive and easy to teach for educators AND families.
Foundational Social Skills
The Social Express is a research-based Social Skills Learning program that allows users an opportunity to learn and practice skills needed to navigate our social world. Special Ed K-12
Career Exploration and Life Skills
Funded by The National Science Foundation, Teen Career Path is the only video game experience for exploring 15 job sectors. Special Ed 9-12+
Our Approach to Learning
Animation is engaging for all ages—that’s why Brighten Learning programs use animated interactive lessons. Video modeling is a form of observational and visual learning in which a targeted behavior or skill is exhibited through a video demonstration in the hopes that the behavior or skill will then be imitated and implemented in a person’s “real” life (National Professional Development Center).
Animations help students simulate and visualize concepts that are too intricate and nuanced to be described in a more traditional teaching approach.
A series of studies have shown that students who are taught in a “mixed system” of traditional teaching methods in cooperation with video modeling “perceive themselves as playing a more central role in classroom interactions and felt a greater interest in learning” (Rosen).
A 2011 study by Durlak et al found that teachers who employed video modeling in a supplementary way in their classrooms improved student achievement by an average of 11 percentage points and influenced their students to engage in more prosocial behaviors – such as kindness, sharing, and empathy.
Students, through video modeling, are thus more likely to be engaged in school and exhibit proactive, positive behaviors. Both of these outcomes improve the social climate of schools, making students more likely to feel welcome and safe at school, thus leading to decreased levels of absent and chronically truant students.
Our Learning Platform Provides:
- Teacher Usage Reports
- Student Usage Reports
- Student Quiz Reports
- Student Survey Reports
- Aggregate District Reports
- Rostering for Staff and Students
- Single Sign On – Schoology, Google MSFT, Clever
- 24/7 Access
Research
Can Computers Teach Social Skills to Children? Examining the Efficacy of “The Social Express…”
“Independent Research at the Tier 1 level, pre-post (immediate) comparisons on a social skills rating scale indicated statistically significant differences by groupstudents with disabilities indicated a statistically significant improvement in social skills when the program was used for at least ten weeks (Krach, McCreery, Miller Doss, & Highsmith, 2020).”
Technical Research Summary for Teen Career Path Grant #1660018
“A cross-sectional research design was employed because of the reliance on existing group differentiation (i.e., disability vs. no disability) and the geographic diversity across research locations. This design is beneficial for measuring differences rather than causal changes, which might be found in an experimental study, and is therefore appropriate for phase II product testing.”
Hope Online Learning Academy Case Study
“Thank you for the opportunity to pilot use of “Social Express” with our special education students during the 2016/2017 School Year. During the year we had the opportunity to utilize the program in a variety of settings and despite some technological issues on our end, we found the curriculum to be engaging and interesting to our students and they enjoyed working on it, both individually and in small groups.”
First Efficacy Study of The Social Express for Social Skill Improvement in Youth with ASD showing evidence of improved social communication and Social-emotional functioning.
“We found that both treatment interventions, CCAL and TSE, had a beneficial effect on anxiety in the youth that were followed in the
current study. This is noteworthy because while social-communication deficits are necessary and must be present for an ASD diagnosis,
anxiety is not a necessary finding for the diagnosis. However, anxiety is a prevalent co-occurring or possibly comorbid condition with
ASD. Social-communication deficits may increase vulnerability to basic developmental challenges and consequently increase the
potential for anxiety to develop (Pickard, Rijsdijk, Happ´e, & Mandy, 2017). Its possible that interventions that also improves
social-communication challenges may result in the development of skills that can be used to navigate and more successfully resolve
conflict that otherwise would increase vulnerability to anxiety. In the present study we found preliminary evidence that the TSE has
some positive effect with respect to anxiety reduction.”
Awards & Features
