App "Prosodiya" aims to support children with dyslexia
Do schoolchildren with dyslexia benefit from an app that allows them to practice independently at home? Does it help the affected children to package the learning content in a digital game? These were the questions addressed in a study in which Manuel Ninaus from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz was also involved.
Elementary school children with dylexia find it difficult, among other things, to recognize how syllables are correctly stressed. Consequently, they also have difficulty spelling words. Just under one in ten children in Germany is affected - to be precise, estimates range from four to ten percent. To help these children, researchers from the Universities of Graz, Tübingen, Karlsruhe and the Technical University of Dortmund, together with the Tübingen Institute for Learning Therapy, have developed the "Prosodiya" app. And they have investigated how its use affects the children's spelling and reading skills.
"Prosodiya" establishes the connection between syllable stress and spelling. The name is derived from "prosody," the technical term for speech melody. The app enables children to practice these skills as part of a digital game for smartphones and tablets, and gives them real-time feedback so that they can practice independently at home - i.e. without having to be guided by teachers, learning therapists or parents. This not only has the advantage of making the learning environment more accessible for the children, but can also make a significant contribution to relieving the burden on the child's environment by eliminating travel and effort.
"We wanted to find out whether this works at all and whether this innovative pedagogical approach makes sense," says Manuel Ninaus from the University of Graz, who was involved in the study. He emphasizes that the study was also a feasibility study in this respect. "The game-based training led to a high level of engagement among the children. It turned out that we even had to limit the time the kids spent using the app by only unlocking new levels only on Sundays."
The study was conducted as a randomized field experiment with a wait-and-see control group. This means that the 116 elementary school children, aged 7 to 10, were randomly assigned to two groups. While the first group received the app and trained with it for nine to ten weeks, the second group had to wait. After that, they were swapped. "You do that for ethical reasons, so that the control group is not deprived of learning benefits if it turns out that the app provides such," Ninaus explains. Incidentally, this study was the first time that unsupervised computer-based spelling training for German was examined in the form of a field study. The researchers hope to gain more meaningful insights in this way than when learning takes place under optimal conditions.
Special consideration was given to the children's preferences. Before the app was created for the study, the researchers tested which visual elements children particularly like and which appeal equally to all genders.
The results of the study are encouraging: Not only did the children seem to enjoy the educational game. By using the app, the children were able to significantly improve their syllable stress awareness and, in parallel, their spelling skills. This effect did not diminish even after the training, which lasted several weeks, had ended. This affected children in both the test group and the waiting group, although the improvement in the waiting group naturally occurred later.
"In this project, our aim was to develop something practical based on empirical research." Ninaus emphasizes. "The project also clearly shows that it takes collaboration from many disciplines to pull something like this off." The project involved psychologists, computer scientists, linguists and empirical educational researchers, among others.
Currently, the app is under maintenance as funding opportunities are sought.
