MobiLe: Mobile reading training

Studies such as the International Primary School Reading Survey (IGLU) have repeatedly shown that many pupils in Germany still have massive difficulties in understanding written text at the end of primary school. These difficulties have a decisive impact on the further course of education, with negative individual, social and economic consequences. A main cause of poor reading performance at primary school age is difficulties in word recognition. The affected pupils have to work through words letter by letter with great effort and are prone to mistakes . Effective and easily accessible interventions are needed to prevent these deficits from becoming entrenched and hindering reading development in the long term.

In a new project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, in which researchers from educational psychology (Prof. Dr. Tobias Richter, Dr. Bettina Müller) and media informatics (Prof. Dr. Birgit Lugrin) are cooperating, a mobile app is being developed that includes a scientifically based digitalized reading training. The app should be flexible, simple and applicable everywhere. The conception of the app is based on an already comprehensively evaluated reading training for second graders with reading difficulties, which focuses on word recognition and uses the syllable as a central unit. The children should learn to read in words based on the syllables they contain instead of letter by letter, which has a positive effect on the speed of word recognition and indirectly on reading comprehension.

The app takes into account the state-of-the-art in psychological reading research, enables training that is individually adapted to the child's level of performance and contains many playful elements. In this way, it offers a motivational form of individual reading promotion that can be used in school and at home. The effectiveness of the app is to be tested in extensive evaluation studies.