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I See Sam Books are a series of early reader books developed to teach children in kindergarten to read. The original series, written in 1972, as part of Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory's (SWRL) Beginning Reading Program (BRP), contained 52 books. The first book in the series starts with just 3 words: I, see, Sam. Every book or two adds a few words, until by book 52, the readers have read 95 different words. The SWRL Kindergarten Beginning Reading Program was first implemented in U.S. public schools in the early 1970's. Due to its tremendous success at achieving its goal of teaching young children to read, over the years the program has been copied, edited and/or revised by a number of individuals, institutions, and companies. The revisions and additions made at Utah State University divided the program into eight sets containing 144 books.

Characters
Most of the characters repeat themselves from book to book. Repeating characters include a rat, a lion, a monkey, a snake, a dog, a mother and baby kangaroo, an ostrich, a giraffe, a bird, a horse, a bee, an elephant, and an ant. One human character, a doctor, makes an appearance in book 36 See Them.

Art
The artist for the first three sets of the SWRL edition was Dr. Susanne Baker. Other artists are unknown. The SWRL drawings consist of simple, black drawings on white paper.

Beginning in 2012, Academic Success For All Learners began updating the artwork for the series. The effort included colorizing the early sets of books and replacing approximately 70% of the art in the upper sets. The upper levels (Sets 4-8) include human characters. New characters were created that were more modern and diverse than the original sets created during the original development at Utah State University. The art team whose efforts were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation included: Nancy Porter, Brian Milligan Jason Bierens, Micheal Muir and Courtney Cano.

History
In 1966 Congress funded the formation of 20 Regional Educational Laboratories to "bridging the gap between research and practice," One of them was the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory (SWRL). In 1972, SWRL developed a program called Beginning Reading Program (BRP), including the I See Sam book series. No individuals are listed as auhors. It was Published by Ginn and Company when it was located in Lexington, Massachusetts and still part of Xerox. Ginn and Company is now an imprint of the Penguin Group. In 1972 SWRL, who had until then held the copyright, turned the "I See Sam" series over to the public domain.

The books originated as an important by-product of R&D conducted by the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational R&D (SWRL). SWRL was one of 20 Laboratories formed by the US Federal Government in 1966 to “translate educational research into practice.”[1] The R&D objective was to teach children to read beginning in Kindergarten. I See Sam was the title of the first book the children were taught to read, and the instructional program was commonly referred to by teachers and children as the “I See Sam Books” or “The Little Yellow Books” from their paperback covers. The program all incorporated professional training for participating administrators and teachers, active involvement of parents/caregivers, provision for tutoring by upper-grade students, regular feedback to teachers on the instructional status of individual students to teachers and to administrators on the status of classes, schools, and districts.

The Kindergarten Reading Program was developed on the basis of research conducted from 1966-76. It was extended to K-3 instruction in Reading, Spelling, and Drama/Public Speaking to form the SWRL Communication Skills Program. Prior to licensing the Program for commercial distribution, the Kindergarten Program was tried out in over 2000 schools involving more than 100,000 kindergarten students in the 1972-73 school year with results replicated in 1973-73. Findings indicated that differences in program performance resulted from differences in days spent on the instruction rather than on different biosocial characteristics. “The data indicate that the concept of ‘educational disadvantaged’ is a creation of manipulable and manipulated conditions readily under the control of schools rather than a condition resulting from immutable genetic and environmental factors that inherently impede schooling.” [2]

In 1995, SWRL and another regional education laboratory (the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development) merged to form WestEd

The Communication Skills Program was licensed for commercial distribution to Ginn and Co, then a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation in 1972 for a period of five years after which it entered the public domain. Ginn ceased distribution of the Program in 1979. The 52 I See Sam books had been used by over a million children, and since the books were given to the children for their personal libraries as they were read, they were widely available. Subsequently, the books have been taken from the public domain by various enterprises for various purposes:

-Read Now modified and incorporated the books into an animated and live action video program: http://readnowabc.com/ Working with a number of the principals directly involved in the original research, First Learning Programs Co. adapted the "I See Sam" material into Read Now!, a beginning reading video program. It is comprised of DVD's and reading booklets featuring the redrawn and updated animal characters, based on the underlying research reading material, featuring special sequencing of words and sentences, phonics, sight reading, animated synchronized reading, whole language elements, self-confidence building, positive reinforcement, original songs and live action segments (for multi-sensory involvement). Read Now! won the "Youth in Film " award as best educational video when it was initially released and has subsequently received overwhelming critical praise as a useful tool to help beginning readers learn to read.

-Mattel’s The Learning Company used the books as the basis for the Reader Rabbit software program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader_Rabbit

-3RsPlus updated the Communication Skills Program as an instructional suite, COMMUNICATE, retaining all the essential elements while reflecting later linguistic research and advances in Information Technology. READ and SPELL have been released, and WRITE and MEDIA are in development: US: www.3rsplus.com UK: http://www.piperbooks.co.uk/ AU: http://www.iseesamreaders.com/joomla_155_test/index.php?option=com_content

The Beginning Reading Instruction Program (BRI) is a product recently updated by the original developers of the Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s uniquely researched and developed Beginning Reading Program for kindergartens. This program, its history, supporting resources, and research on its long-term effects, can be found on: www.3RsPlus.com. 

-Readingware issued the books as multimedia e-books. http://www.readingware.com/Samdemo/

-ReadingTeacher.com colorized and animated the books and added additional books and auxiliary materials for “a strong phonics foundation.” http://www.readingteacher.com/ ReadingTeacher developed 48 more books to complete the phonemes, and advanced aspects of the alphabetic code, not covered in the original program. The ReadingTeacher version of the program is offered as a free service.

-In 1993, a team from the Utah State University, led by Dr. Alan Hofmeister, completed a range of modifications to the original Beginning Reading Program, building upon it to develop its "Reading For All Learners Program" (RALP). Much of the content of the "I See Sam Books" is incorporated into the first two sets of RALP. The changes, while leaving much of the original artwork and stories intact, were substantive enough to meet federal copyright requirements and allow copyright to be placed on the RALP version. The changes included the addition of new books and characters, embedding formative assessments and instructor prompts/cues. Additional changed involved computer analysis and revision of the stories to ensure newly introduced sounds and words are adequately practiced.

Academic Success for All Learners modified the instructional procedures and published the Reading Program as “Reading for All Learners” preceded by a Phonemic Awareness program and followed by a Fluency program: http://www.iseesam.com/

-The RALP version has been incorporated into New York City's READ Alliance, and is used by a number of schools across the U.S.

-In 2013 the National Science Foundation awarded Academic Success For All Learners a research and development grant to make improvements to the program and develop an edition of the program for mobile devices. The mobile device applications were completed in 2015 and were made available for iOS, Android and Kindle Fire devices. Additionally, the NSF grant provided resources to support the development of student data management and assessment software for teachers and literacy specialists working with Reading For All Learners.

Copyright status
The original Beginning Reading Program's 1972 version was released to the public domain in 1977. The RALP version is copyrighted by Alan M. Hofmeister the lead USU researcher responsible for the program additions made at USU. Read Now! the video adaptation of the reading program is copyrighted by First Leaning Programs Co.

Significance
According to WestEd, during the 1970s, more than a million children learned to read using SWRL's Begining to Read Program, making it in their mind one of the most significant contributions of any of the Regional Education Laboratories. "Controlled studies of impact consistently revealed stunning results in terms of the BRP students' reading comprehension and other desirable outcomes."

A follow-up study on the SWRL Beginning Reading Program, conducted when the kindergarten students had gone on to become high school seniors, demonstrated long-term benefits of the instruction with a sample of over 2000 students who had received the instruction performing superior to a matched control group who had not received such instruction in kindergarten performing superior on all 16 criteria, ranging from standardized reading tests to indicators of juvenile delinquency.[3] Perhaps the most amazing finding of this follow-up study was that, as seniors in high school, those students from Title 1 elementary schools who received the SWRL Beginning Reading Program, OUTPREFORMED students from Non-title I elementary schools in the same district, but DID NOT receive the instruction, on reading skills as measured on a standardized test of reading. These results show that, by receiving kindergarten instruction in this program, the reading difficulties typically experienced by students in Title I schools can be overcome.

"During the 2001-02 school year, the average Harlem elementary school student increased his or her reading level by 1.1 grade as a result of an after-school peer-tutoring program where RALP was used as the central curriculum."