Browsing by Author "Wahlström, Maaria"

Supportive measures for reading difficulties are traditionally only available to children who have noticeably failed to achieve the reading level of their peers after a considerable amount of reading instruction at school. However, there's evidence that susceptibility to reading difficulties can be assessed already at the age of four, by considering familial risk and deficits in preliteracy skills such as phonological awareness and decoding. The development of digital learning games creates an opportunity to provide computer programs as affordable supportive measures, but evidence of their effectiveness for younger children is still scarce. This review of computerized early interventions and their results is motivated by the importance of finding ways to prevent reading difficulties before school-age, in order to allow all children an optimal chance to learn to read. A search was conducted on the Scopus database with a publishing time range of 2010-2018. The search terms were “intervention”, “dyslexia”, “computerized”, and “kindergarten”, with some alternative wordings. Seven articles were found to fulfill the following criteria: reporting an intervention using computerized training to prevent reading difficulties with participants under school-age. Computerized interventions for children aged from 4 to 6 are not consistently effective for all participants, and evidence for the persistence of gains is varied. Nevertheless, there have been no reports of adverse effects from practicing with games, which is why such a cost-effective supportive measure can be recommended. An intervention is more likely to benefit a child who has poor preliteracy skills, advanced phonological working memory, or a genetic susceptibility to environmental effects. The child’s preliteracy skill profile and the quality of other preliteracy instruction may also contribute to which skills are affected by the intervention.