Assessing the Content and Quality of Commercially Available Reading Software Programs: Do They Have the Fundamental Structures to Promote the Development of Early Reading Skills in Children?

Abstract

The current study developed a taxonomy of reading skills and compared this taxonomy with skills being trained in 30 commercially available software programs designed to teach emergent literacy or literacy-specific skills for children in preschool, kindergarten, and Grade 1. Outcomes suggest that, although some skills are being trained in a developmentally appropriate manner (e.g., Alphabetic Knowledge), others are absent or have incomplete presentations. Additionally, the quality of instruction for skills being trained was generally quite low due to limited examples for training each skill and few opportunities to practice the skills. Finally, scaffolding by providing access to easier and more challenging items and automaticity in moving children among levels of difficulty were inconsistent across software packages and within the software. Recommendations on best practices for choosing emergent literacy software packages and for designing pedagogically appropriate software for young children were provided.

Keywords:

• computer software
• technology
• emergent literacy
• reading development

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the reading experts who contributed to this research.

Notes

1. Reliability (percentage agreement) was also calculated for each skill coded. Concepts of Print = 97%, Alphabetic Knowledge = 81%, Phonological Awareness = 88%, Grapheme-Phoneme Relationship = 86%, Phonics = 81%, Syntactic Awareness = 89%, Decoding = 90%, Fluency = 86%, Text Comprehension = 89%. Given the type of scale used for quality ratings, Cohen's kappa could not be computed for this measure.

2. Only 33 of the possible 45 comparisons could be conducted as some subskills were not trained at all or at some developmental levels.