Interactive stories and exercises with dynamic feedback for improving reading comprehension skills in deaf children

Deaf children have significant difficulties in comprehending written text. This is mainly due to the hearing loss that prevents them from being exposed to oral language when they were an infant. However, it is also due to the type of educational intervention they are faced with, which accustoms them to decoding single words and isolated sentences, rather than entire texts. This paper presents an evolved version of a literacy web tool for deaf children based on stories and comprehension exercises. Two substantial improvements were made with the respect to the first version of our application. First, the text of the stories is now presented to children in the context of animated web pages. Second, intelligent dynamic feedback is given to the users when resolving the exercises. A preliminary evaluation study with deaf children, as the treatment group, and hearing children, as the control group, assessed the usability and effectiveness of the new system and its graphical interface.

[1]  Marc Marschark,et al.  Enhancing deaf students' learning from sign language and text: metacognition, modality, and the effectiveness of content scaffolding. , 2011, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[2]  Peter V. Paul,et al.  Reading and Deaf Children. , 2002 .

[3]  Mary Marshal Gentry,et al.  Effectiveness of Multimedia Reading Materials When Used With Children Who Are Deaf , 2004, American annals of the deaf.

[4]  Robert T. Solman,et al.  The Influence of Illustrations on Children's Comprehension of Written Stories , 1987 .

[5]  Philip Murphy,et al.  READING COMPREHENSION EXERCISES ONLINE: THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK, PROFICIENCY AND INTERACTION Paginated PDF Version , 2007 .

[6]  Margaret Harris,et al.  Reading and spelling abilities of deaf adolescents with cochlear implants and hearing AIDS. , 2011, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[7]  B. A. Smallwood.  Thematic Literature and Curriculum for English Language Learners in Early Childhood Education. ERIC Digest. , 2002 .

[8]  John E. Gump.  The Readability of Typefaces and the Subsequent Mood or Emotion Created in the Reader , 2001 .

[9]  D. Nicol,et al.  Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice , 2006 .

[10]  Maria Virvou,et al.  Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness , 2005, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[11]  Theo van Leeuwen,et al.  Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design , 1996 .

[12]  Adina Shamir,et al.  E-books effectiveness in promoting phonological awareness and concept about print: a comparison between children at risk for learning disabilities and typically developing kindergarteners , 2011, Comput. Educ..

[13]  Mairéad MacSweeney,et al.  Predictors of reading delay in deaf adolescents: the relative contributions of rapid automatized naming speed and phonological awareness and decoding. , 2003, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[14]  Harm Tillema,et al.  Effects of Formative Feedback on Intrinsic Motivation: Examining Ethnic Differences. , 2012 .

[15]  H. Furth.  A comparison of reading test norms of deaf and hearing children. , 1966, American annals of the deaf.

[16]  Keith Oatley,et al.  Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading , 2011, Cognition & emotion.

[17]  Magda Nikolaraizi,et al.  The design of a software to enhance the reading comprehension skills of deaf students: An integration of multiple theoretical perspectives , 2011, Education and Information Technologies.

[18]  Vivi Lachs.  Making Multimedia in the Classroom: A Teachers' Guide , 2000 .

[19]  Pietro Lucisano,et al.  Gulpease: una formula per la predizione della leggibilita di testi in lingua italiana , 1988 .

[20]  William E. Nagy,et al.  Learning Word Meanings From Context During Normal Reading , 1987 .

[21]  Geoffrey Underwood,et al.  The word recognition skills of profoundly, prelingually deaf children , 1994 .

[22]  Ellie Meleisea,et al.  Using ICT to Develop Literacy. , 2006 .

[23]  E. B. Coleman.  Improving comprehensibility by shortening sentences. , 1962 .

[24]  C. B. Traxler,et al.  The Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition: National Norming and Performance Standards for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students. , 2000, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[25]  Barbara S. Chaparro,et al.  Perception of fonts: Perceived personality traits and uses , 2006 .

[26]  Richard T. Vacca,et al.  Content Area Reading , 1981 .

[27]  D. Willows.  A Picture Is Not Always Worth a Thousand Words: Pictures as Distractors in Reading. , 1978 .

[28]  Linda B. Gambrell,et al.  Mental imagery, text illustrations, and children's story comprehension and recall. , 1993 .

[29]  C Lewis,et al.  Typographic influences on reading. , 1989, British journal of psychology.

[30]  Krzysztof R. Apt,et al.  Constraint logic programming using Eclipse , 2007 .

[31]  C. Caselli,et al.  Lexical and grammatical abilities in deaf Italian preschoolers: the role of duration of formal language experience. , 2009, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[32]  Angela D. Friederici,et al.  Neural language networks at birth (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2011) 108, 38 (16056-16061) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1102991108) , 2011 .

[33]  Russell N. Carney,et al.  Pictorial Illustrations Still Improve Students' Learning from Text , 2002 .

[34]  M. McDaniel,et al.  Illustrations as adjuncts to prose: a text-appropriate processing approach , 1988 .

[35]  Furth Hg,et al.  A comparison of reading test norms of deaf and hearing children. , 1966 .

[36]  A. Wilkins,et al.  Reading at a distance: implications for the design of text in children's big books. , 2002, The British journal of educational psychology.

[37]  Peter V. Paul,et al.  Literacy and Deafness: The Development of Reading, Writing, and Literate Thought , 1997 .

[38]  Carol A. Fraser,et al.  The Role of Consulting a Dictionary in Reading and Vocabulary Learning , 1999 .

[39]  James F. Allen.  Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals , 1983, CACM.

[40]  Carol Musselman,et al.  How Do Children Who Can't Hear Learn to Read an Alphabetic Script? A Review of the Literature on Reading and Deafness. , 2000, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[41]  G. Whitehurst,et al.  Child development and emergent literacy. , 1998, Child development.

[42]  Daniele Capuano,et al.  Strategies for Italian Deaf Learners , 2011 .

[43]  Michael Pressley,et al.  Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon. , 2001 .

[44]  Frank Allgöwer,et al.  Motivation and Learning Progress Through Educational Games , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[45]  Lauren F. V. Scharff,et al.  THE INFLUENCE OF ILLUSTRATIONS ON CHILDREN'S BOOK PREFERENCES AND COMPREHENSION , 2002 .