HCI Project 2007

HCI 2 is a module at the Computer Science school at the University of Birmingham. The HCI Project 2007 blog is the place where the team will discuss ideas and processes involved in developing a 'useful piece of technology' for our target audience - children <= 11 years old.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Case: Story Time Won't Help Reading

A study by Université de Moncton has shown that reading to children during story time may not actually improve the child's reading ability. Their study monitored where the child's attention was when someone was reading to them and the results show that the child focuses primarily on the images in the book, and not the words. Traditionally it was thought that reading to children would help their reading abilities but these results contradict that, as children can't possibly become familiar with words that are being read to them without focusing on them.

This article is interesting in regards to our word scanner. It raises two issues. The first is that the word scanner shouldn't just read the word, but offer the child to find out information about it too, so that they learn it. Secondly it shows the importance of researching how a child learns how to read, especially when they come across unfamiliar words because traditional methods may not actually help.

The article can be found on the CBC News website here.

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