This video illustrates the enhanced working relations that CAPOLSA has been delighted to achieve this year with the Zambian national Government, in the context of the Ministry of Education’s new National Literacy Framework.
Author Archives: Eeva
Special Issue of Human Technology on Supporting Urgent Basic Reading Skills in Children
We are pleased to announce that the new issue of the on-line journal Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Humans in ICT Environments has been published.
This Special Issue on Supporting Urgent Basic Reading Skills in Children, edited by Prof. Heikki Lyytinen and Prof. Ulla Richardson of the Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, comprises original papers addressing the technological, academic, and environmental support needed to help young struggling readers. You can access the issue at http://www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/current/
GraphoGame will help children with dyslexia in Emirati
On Sunday, May 18 2014, the Ta’leem Training and Skill Development Centre in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, signed an agreement with the Niilo Mäki Foundation, the Agora Centre and the University of Jyvaskyla, to provide the GraphoGame.
Ms Shereen Al Nowais, the Ta’leem founder, said she wanted to start using the GraphoGame as soon as possible. She also planned on opening a branch of the Agora Centre for Human Technology, which assisted in creating the GraphoGame, in Abu Dhabi. “The programme will be exclusively used by the Ta’leem Centre to help teach students with learning disabilities, but will also help in preventing learning disabilities developing.”
Read the whole article in The National.
ReadAll – all read?
We are proudly announcing the beginning of a new GraphoGame related research project: ReadAll.
Technology-enhanced environment for supporting reading development in all learners (ReadAll) is a new four-year project funded by the Future of Learning, Knowledge and Skills (TULOS) Research Programme of the Academy of Finland.
In this joint project between the Niilo Mäki Institute and Agora Center in he University of Jyväskylä a new dynamic version of GraphoGame will be developed to train both reading accuracy and speed (fluent reading skills). The bottlenecks struggling readers have will be investigated from the early experience of the game. This information will be directly utilized into developing individually adaptive training environment for 7-11 years old children.
The aim is to develop evidence-based and cost-effective environment for efficiently developing reading skills with automatic evaluation suited for individual learners with varying skill levels.
Promotion of literacy in China, The Netherlands and Finland
Until recently, specific developmental reading difficulty, dyslexia, has been recognized and investigated mainly in the English speaking countries and in other western languages. However, in the past years it has been reported that between 5% and 10% of school-aged Chinese children have dyslexia. Reading difficulties in Chinese are found mainly in word reading and spelling.
Since there is no standardized reading assessment in Mandarin, these children cannot be diagnosed until their friends have learned to read in the fifth or sixth years of primary school.
New versions of GraphoGame in Chinese Pinyin and Mandarin
Children with dyslexia are often mistakenly regarded as lazy or lacking motivation to learning. The parents and teachers need to realize this specific reading disability. There are 270 000 000 Children in China below 14 years old, thus the number of children with dyslexia could be more than 13 000 000 according to the 5% low estimation. No specific treatment program or institution is available in mainland of China. These children get frustrated and their school performance as well as self-esteem suffers significantly.
The cooperation between Finnish and Chinese researchers aims to develop a Chinese GraphoGame on Pinyin and Mandarin as well as investigate effectiveness of those games to help Chinese children to learn to read in Chinese.
A Dutch version GraphoGame
The aim is to develop a GraphoGame version so that Dutch children can take the first steps in learning to read. The game content will also provide appropriate training in reading fluency for those who already have learned the basic skill. Those children can read accurately but reading still needs a strong effort and may be very slow.
Empirical studies of both Chinese and Dutch GraphoGames
Based on the new language versions the project will then take on the challenge of studying the effectiveness of these games in empirical settings.
All partners from Finland, China and the Netherlands have since long been involved and successful in longitudinal studies from children at risk of dyslexia. The project will concentrate on investigation of these unique data-sets and potentially produces significant scientific breakthroughs as a joint effort.
The LITERATE project is funded by the EU Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme LITERATE-project PIRSES-GA-2013-612663
A new study about game features and children’s engagement in using GraphoGame
An article recently published in Computers & Education highlights the importance of game features in supporting children’s engagement in digital game -based learning. Earlier studies have shown that GraphoGame helps children to acquire the basics of reading, but less is known about its effect on children’s motivation. Children with a risk for reading disability often need several hours of training before they learn to master the connections between letters and sounds, and therefore it is important that GraphoGame does not lose its appeal too soon.
The article reports the findings of a study in which the effects of two game features, a reward system and the level of challenge, were investigated in an experimental setting. The participants were Finnish first and second graders (N = 138), each of whom were given one of four versions of GraphoGame to use at their homes for eight weeks. Each version had a different combination of the game features: the reward system was either present or absent, and the level of challenge was either high or typical.
If the reward system was present, the player earned tokens and gained access to new game levels after a certain number of completed tasks. The level of challenge was determined by Bayesian adaptation logic, and was set either as high (around 60% success rate), or as typical (80% success rate).
It was found that the children playing with the reward system versions initially played longer sessions than the children playing without the reward system. However, after the first sessions the playing times started to decline, and eventually there were no differences in the total playing time among different player groups. This suggests that the reward system was able to increase children’s engagement only temporarily. However, according to the parents, the children using the reward system versions concentrated better during gaming than the other children. Generally, playing was less frequent than expected in all player groups. The level of challenge did not have significant effect on children’s engagement.
The results suggest that it is important to investigate the long-term effects of game features further and keep developing features that not only trigger, but also sustain children’s engagement until the goals set for learning are achieved.
Source: Ronimus, M., Kujala, J., Tolvanen, A. & Lyytinen, H. (2014). Children’s engagement during digital game-based learning or reading: The effects of time, rewards, and challenge. Computers & Education, 71, 237– 246. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.10.008