Objective
The main aim of this project is to identify practices for improving dyslexic children’s reading abilities, starting from some very recent stimulating findings in the field (Facoetti A., Franceschini S., Molteni M., Gori S., Ruffino M., Viola S., 2013): in March 2013, the journal 'Current Biology' has published the results of a research carried out at the University of Padua (Italy) in which Italian dyslexic children’s development of reading skills has been correlated to attention training: following research works analysing the role of Action Video Games for training attention published on very influential journals in the last ten years, the dyslexic children have been asked to play Action Video Games for 12 hours with no other orthographic or phonological training. At the end of the Video Games sessions the researchers have found out that reading speed has improved considerably, without any cost in accuracy. In particular, it has improved more than what it generally improves after one year of spontaneous reading development.
The present proposal aims at expanding the Italian data by evaluating the efficacy of this kind of training with English speaking children (in the otgoing phase) and with another sample of Italian children (in the return pase). In both Countries (Australia and Italy) three groups of children will be selected: a group will be trained through the same Action Video Games used in the Padua research; a group will be trained through a multimodal hypermedia platform; a third group of children will continue being treated with traditional methods. This will permit a deeper investigation of attention training efficacy for improving reading abilities and, at the same time, a cross-linguistic analysis to analyse the role of the language spoken by children.
This research may also help lay the basis for tcreating Adaptive Training Platforms where children’s reading abilities can be improved through stimulating and user-friendly digital environments.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IOF - International Outgoing Fellowships (IOF)Coordinator
33100 Udine
Italy