Lexiland: A Tablet-based Universal Screener for Reading Difficulties in the School Context

Abstract

Massive and timely screening of the student population for early signs of reading difficulties is needed to implement timely effective remediation of these difficulties. However, traditional approaches are costly and hard to apply. Here we present Lexiland, a tablet-based reading assessment tool for kindergarten and primary school children developed to be applied in school settings with minimal personnel intervention. Following a story line, players help a character of the game perform several tasks that measure different predictors of reading outcomes. Most of the tasks that usually involve a verbal response were switched to receptive tasks to demand a touch-screen response only. The tablet application was administered to a sample of N=616 5-yo kindergarten children and to a sub-sample of these children twice during the following two years (First and Second Grades). Applying logistic regression and cross-validation, we selected a reduced subset of tasks that can predict with great sensitivity and specificity, whether a five-year-old child will have reading difficulties by the end of first grade (sensitivity, 90% and specificity 76%) and two years later (sensitivity 90%, specificity, 61%). Importantly, Lexiland is a scalable tool to implement universal screening, given the increasing availability of devices able to run android and iOS applications.

Mind the orthography: Revisiting the contribution of prereading phonological awareness to reading acquisition.

“…All tasks were presented digitally through individual tablets, except for reading and RAN. In order to do so, we created an Android-based application in videogame format, called Lexiland (Zugarramurdi et al, in press). Instructions and stimuli were prerecorded and delivered though headphones.…”

Early delta cortical tracking to non-verbal auditory stimuli predicts reading skills: A one-year longitudinal study

“…During kindergarten, most children (n = 33) could not read any of the presented words and pseudowords, and three children had already started learning how to read (they could read 9 out of 15 pseudowords, on average). At the end of first grade, mean reading accuracy was 0.75 (SD = 0.32, min = 0, max = 1) and reading scores displayed a bimodal distribution (see Zugarramurdi et al, 2021 for a broader description). Based on a -1 z score threshold, children were divided into two groups: poor readers (PR, mean accuracy = 0.13, min = 0, max = 0.45, n = 7) and typical readers (TR, mean accuracy = 0.89, min = 0.7, max = 1, n = 29).…”

“…Forty children attending kindergarten (K5) took part in the study (21 males, age range 5 -6.5 years, mean = 6.1). These were selected as part of a larger study on reading acquisition (reported in Zugarramurdi et al, 2021Zugarramurdi et al, , 2022. All participants' caregivers provided informed written consent and all children verbally agreed to participate.…”