Flinders University study verifies value of SA-made Reading Doctor literacy apps
There are thousands of reading apps out there, so how do parents and teachers know what to choose? Flinders University research has verified that one made here in SA really works.
Education
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Parents and teachers are being bamboozled by hundreds of thousands of education apps, many of them aimed at preschoolers and most with no independent verification that they work.
But a new Flinders University study has found that a suite of SA-made phonics apps, called Reading Doctor, helps preschoolers with developmental language disorder to improve their early reading skills significantly.
And separately, yet-to-be published Flinders research has confirmed that the same programs, already used in hundreds of Australian schools, are effective literacy tools for Reception students, regardless of whether they have learning difficulties.
Researcher and speech pathologist Dr Karyn Carson decided to explore Reading Doctor because her young son suffered from a high number of ear infections, and hearing problems are connected with literacy difficulties.
In the published study, she found four-year-olds with developmental language disorder made big improvements in blending letter sounds into words, breaking words into component sounds, and reading simple words over an eight-week period, compared with a control group that did not use the apps. While the sample size was small, the results were very promising, she said.
Dr Carson stressed she had no connection to the Wayville-based business.
There are more than 200,000 education and reference apps available for the iPad alone.
“It’s like the digital Wild West. Almost anyone can create an app,” Dr Carson said.
“It is the job of the scientific community to support educators and parents in differentiating which apps value-add and have proven research effectiveness and which apps do not.”
As an example, she pointed to a 2018 La Trobe University analysis of 132 apps for children with speech disorders, which found only 25 were any good.
Adelaide speech pathologist Dr Bartek Rajkowski, who did his doctorate on the underlying causes of literacy problems, launched the first version of Reading Doctor for PC in 2007 because he was frustrated by the lack of evidence-based software available.
A major update is about to be released, allowing schools to keep detailed online records for each child.
Reading Doctor has tens of thousands of users, including up to 700 schools, but Dr Rajkowski said it was still hard to gain attention in the crowded app market.
“Most of them are junk. Very, very few of them are research-based and a minuscule number are evidence-based,” he said.
Dr Carson’s study, titled “Can an app a day keep illiteracy away?”, is published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.