Reading is one of the most important skills that children learn as they enter education – but for one in five children, learning to read is a challenge.
To the letter: A Macquarie University Reading Clinic study shows the effectiveness of online lessons for children with reading difficulties.
By the time her son D’Arcy was halfway through his first year of school, Nicole Kearns says it was obvious that reading was a real struggle for him.
“He was fine with everything else in the classroom, but reading was hard,” she says.
Medical and cognitive tests showed D’Arcy had no other issues. “He was an average six-year-old boy in everything except reading,” Nicole says – so D’Arcy joined the school’s reading support classes.
This research has just become even more relevant as we practice physical distancing and clinics try to work out how to continue to cater for children with dyslexia.
Progress was slow, so the family made the three-hour round trip from their home south of Sydney to Macquarie University’s specialist reading clinic to get further assessment for D’Arcy. D’Arcy was offered a place on the clinic’s reading intervention program delivered via video-conference.
“My husband and I both work full-time and it would be really hard to travel there once a week, let alone twice or three times for an intensive program, so we decided to give Zoom a try,” Nicole says.
No time for distractions
The sessions began last year – before the pandemic, when there was less widespread acceptance of video conferencing – and D’Arcy has been attending for nearly a year.
Nicole says that D’Arcy, now 8, has really come along well, learning his phonics to read more words and gaining confidence from the three 45-minutes sessions each week before school.
“He does sometimes complain about it, like any kid asked to do more of something they find difficult, but once he’s online and the tutor is there, he’s fully engaged,” she says.
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“The tutors use Zoom really well, they’ll have a book, use a whiteboard, then change to the live video; there’s never a break between activities so there’s no time to get distracted."
Although D’Arcy has two different clinicians, the sessions are always consistent and build on each other, she adds.
“You can never tell the difference between the lessons, so they must hand over really well between the sessions and obviously spend a lot of time outside of the sessions, making sure that that 45 minutes is really valuable to the kid.”
The bonuses of live-streaming
Dr Saskia Kohnen, the Clinical Director of the Macquarie University Reading Clinic, says the clinic's study found that live-streaming of literacy interventions using platforms such as Zoom can lead to significant improvements in reading scores.
The study piloted live-streaming interventions for 18 children with poor reading and spelling skills and found they made reading gains compared to a business-as-usual control (attending school with the usual teaching).
Kohnen says that arranging for the level of consistent, intensive, in-person reading support that is sometimes needed to help children master the complex skills of reading and spelling, is challenging for many families.
We know that for many reading interventions to be effective they need to be run at relatively high intensity, but that’s very hard to manage for many families.
After-school schedules are often tight, there is limited access to high quality services in many parts of the country, and travel to and from the program can add hours to the time needed, she says – so the convenience and wide geographic reach of video interventions, using platforms such as Zoom, are a bonus.
“This research has just become even more relevant as we practice physical distancing and clinics try to work out how to continue to cater for children with dyslexia,” Kohnen says.
“We need to know if live-streaming is effective. Many out-of-school intervention services, including our clinic, have been offering video-conferencing for a long time, and more clinics and clinicians have taken up this mode of delivery as a direct result of COVID-19 restrictions."
Lockdown highlighted importance of reading
“Reading is so important; in the first couple of years at school, children need to transition from mastering the mechanics of reading to becoming fluent readers as reading is used as the basis for nearly all other learning," Kohnen says
Screen test: Dr Saskia Kohnen says video-conferencing could overcome many areas of disadvantage.
Most tasks given to children at school are accompanied by written information, which puts more barriers in the way for any child who has not achieved reading fluency.
“We saw this happen even more when lockdown started; school work was often sent in writing, and even in video lessons, if there’s a chat running at the side of the virtual classroom – you need to be able to read rapidly, spell well and write quickly, to join in.”
At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020, an estimated 1.2 billion children in 186 countries – or 60 per cent of the world’s school students – were affected by school closures.
The result: the largest online education movement in world history – and a situation which disadvantaged any student without fluent reading skills.
Kohnen says that it is really important to find out the effectiveness of video streaming to deliver reading interventions, because it could overcome many areas of disadvantage.
“We know that for many reading interventions to be effective they need to be run at relatively high intensity, often over months, several times a week, but that’s very hard to manage for many families,” she says.
“There could be some additional benefits to live-streaming in the commuting time saved and overcoming distance, and that might also mean there’s better adherence to the program, but it’s not something that has been measured yet.”
The clinic hopes to follow this pilot study with a randomised controlled trial comparing in-person and video-streamed literacy interventions.
Dr Saskia Kohnen is Clinical Director of the Macquarie University Reading Clinic.
