Abstract
An advantage of digital media is the flexibility to personalize the presentation of text to an individual's needs and embed tools that support pedagogy. The goal of this study was to develop a tablet-based reading tool, grounded in the principles of phonics-based instruction, and determine whether struggling readers could leverage this technology to decode challenging words. The tool presents a small icon below each vowel to represent its sound. Forty struggling child readers were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group to test the efficacy of the phonemic cues. We found that struggling readers could leverage the cues to improve pseudoword decoding: after two weeks of practice, the intervention group showed greater improvement than controls. This study demonstrates the potential of a text annotation, grounded in intervention research, to help children decode novel words. These results highlight the opportunity for educational technologies to support and supplement classroom instruction.
Highlights
The discrepancy between the value that society places on literacy and reading achievement levels in American youth [1] is a source of concern both among policy makers and scientists [2, 3]
Despite randomization, the intervention group by chance had lower scores than the control group: this is evidenced by the significant main effect of group in the mixed effects model (β = -6.2, t(156) = -2.65, p = 0.009)
Using a small scale randomized control trial (RCT) design, we tested the hypotheses that struggling readers could leverage a phonemic image cue placed below the vowels in digitally presented text to improve reading accuracy for isolated words and connected text, and that this benefit would be more pronounced for those readers with lower performance on measures on phonological processing
Summary
The discrepancy between the value that society places on literacy and reading achievement levels in American youth [1] is a source of concern both among policy makers and scientists [2, 3]. Poor literacy rates are a nationwide issue, with 34% of fourth graders performing below the Basic level on national achievement tests [6]. Together, these results paint a troubling landscape of literacy achievement and illuminate a non-trivial need for expanding access to evidence-based instruction and intervention. Children with reading disabilities struggle to find the support they need in their typical classrooms, necessitating supplemental, after-school programs [8]
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