Search & Teach is an early intervention program developed to meet the educational needs of students in kindergarten through 2nd grade before they experience the frustration of learning failure. This differs from NILD Educational Therapy^®, which was designed to help students who have documented learning difficulties, and in many cases have already experienced frustration and failure in the regular classroom.

Search is a 20-minute individual test designed to identify five and six-year-olds who are vulnerable to learning difficulty, and to provide profiles of individual strengths and weaknesses in the readiness skills necessary for reading success.

Teach is a program of 55 learning activities called "tasks," carefully designed to address the needs revealed by Search. Teach is generally offered to individuals or very small groups of children with like needs in a center, resource room, or small area within a classroom.

Search is the screening component of the program

• Consists of three tests of visual perception, two auditory tests, two tests of intermodal skills, and three neuro-developmental tests
• Provides norms for children 64 to 80 months of age, and also for individual demographic groups
• Can be used with individual children but is most effective and was intended to be used to scan an entire kindergarten or early first grade class
• Can provide a profile of an entire class, benefitting teachers as they plan the scope and sequence of instruction

Teach is the instructional component of the program, provided during a minimum of three 30-minute sessions per week.

• Consists of remedial tasks ordered from simple to complex, and organized into visual, visual-motor, auditory, body-image, and intermodal skill clusters which correspond to the elements of the Search test.
• Provides for each of the following tasks:
  • A rationale relating the task to reading, writing and spelling
  • Step-by-step teaching instructions
  • Well-defined mastery criteria to be applied prior to progressing the child to a more difficult task