The Game That Can Spot Preschoolers at Risk for Reading Deficits

January 9, 2020

By: Jackie Mader

Source: The Hechinger Report

What if a short digital game for young children could help lower the high school drop out rate? That’s a long-range goal of a new effort by a team from Boston Children’s Hospital in collaboration with Florida State University, which has developed a 15 to 20-minute game that tests children’s early literacy skills and generates a red flag for those in need of extra support.  Research shows if a child is not reading by the end of third grade, they are far more likely to drop out of high school, which means early support can be critical.

Called the Boston Children’s Hospital Early Literacy Screener, the new game is administered on a touchscreen tablet. Kids as young as 4-years-old do tasks geared at assessing their literacy skills with the help of on-screen cartoon animals. Those include touching the picture that matches the word that is said out loud, identifying rhyming words, and finding the picture that matches a spoken sentence.