Philip Nordness, Ph.D., of the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Jennifer Clark, an early childhood special education teacher, conducted a study on the effect of using a SMART Board to enhance the emergent literary skills in early education among special education students. The study showed that the students receiving instruction with the SMART Board were more successful in grasping concepts with a Batelle subscale score of 0.123 versus a score of 0.042 from the children receiving traditional instruction. The memory and reasoning skills of the children had also increased, though there were no significant gains in student performance to report.
A yearlong study conducted by teachers at St. Joseph Catholic School in Memphis, Tennessee, on elementary students' ability to grasp the math concepts using SMART Boards in place of traditional instructional methods of computation, multiplication with whole numbers and division with whole numbers showed a notable improvement among the students. The students were given a standardized test at the beginning of the school year and then again at the end. The results showed an 8 percent increase in computation, a 25 percent increase in multiplication and a 23 percent increase in division for students testing at or above grade level.
Second grade teacher, Carrie Gilbert from Forestville Elementary in Great Falls, Virginia, reported successful results when studying the effect of the SMART Board on the writing skills of children. Gilbert states that the attention and focus improved among her class and that they were able to express their thoughts and feelings easier. The students also gained the ability to self-edit their writing pieces and expressed an increase in their enjoyment of the writing process.
Carolyn Fortuna, a high school teacher and Ph.D. in education candidate at Rhode Island College, studied the effect SMART Boards have on literacy skills among teenagers. The study--focused on the SMART Board's ability to enhance reading, knowing, viewing, speaking, and learning among teenagers attending high school--provided no statistical numbers or test scores, but rather stated an improvement among the students in willingness to learn as it allowed them to connect aspects of their own life to the literary concepts they were studying.