Accelerating reading acquisition and boosting comprehension with a cognitive science-based tablet training

Abstract

Tablets and computers offer opportunities for learning, but their potential is only as great as the quality of the software they propose. Educational games must not only provide an engaging design, but also be based on principles from cognitive neuroscience and education research, and be evaluated in large-scale classroom tests. Here, we describe ELAN, an adaptive game that supports literacy acquisition through teaching and training phonics. It provides explicit systematic grapheme–phoneme correspondence instruction and reinforces full decoding through reading and spelling practice with 100% decodable text. The game also uses periodical lexical decision tasks to measure the transition from letter-by-letter decoding to fluent word recognition. The software was tested in a randomized control trial in 44 first-grade classrooms (n = 975 French children). Children who used ELAN software during the first term improved relative to two control groups, respectively, using math software or no-tablet “business-as-usual” classrooms. Improvements were significant in reading fluency (one-minute word and pseudo-word reading) and sentence reading comprehension, consistent with the idea that improved decoding can help the child focus on understanding. These results emphasize the importance of early, explicit and systematic phonics training, and provide a new software tool to facilitate it.