press releases
April 11, 2022
A new study from the Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences at UW focuses on the early reading skills of preschoolers.Rendy Novantino / Unsplash
As the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across the country, students of all ages — from high schoolers in Advanced Placement classes to preschoolers getting their ABCs nailed — switched to distance learning on a screen.
And while learning to read in an online environment may seem challenging, a new study from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences finds that children can develop important reading skills in a virtual classroom with other students. Researchers say their Reading Camp program not only demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach, but also the potential to reach larger numbers of students remotely, whether necessary or voluntary.
“Children are ready to learn to read by the age of 5. But the pandemic has deprived children of the opportunity for face-to-face reading lessons. What we’ve shown here is that an online reading camp designed to encourage social learning works phenomenally. An online camp can be used by children anywhere in the world, and that’s really exciting,” said the faculty author Patricia KuehlCo-Director of I-LABS and UW Professor of Language and Hearing Sciences.
That to learnpublished online March 31 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, describes a two-week reading program that teachers made available remotely to 83 5-year-olds starting in fall 2020.
A screenshot from Reading Camp shows one of the ways the program engaged preschoolers: teachers wore funny hats, kids “voted” the right letter and sound with plastic eggs, and each lesson had a theme – in this case, farm animals.Institute for Learning and Neurosciences
Learning to read involves a series of steps, from recognizing different sounds in a language (phonological awareness), to identifying the names of individual letters and how they sound (letter-sound knowledge), to decoding words and their meanings.
The study finds that participants demonstrated learning of certain reading skills, such as phonological awareness and letter proficiency, compared to a control group of children who did not receive the tuition.
I-LABS researchers, including study co-author Jason Yeatman (now at Stanford University) offered a two-week reading summer camp in 2019 to teach pre-kindergarten children early literacy skills and measure brain activity before and after class. With the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020, the researchers decided to convert the face-to-face reading camp into an online version via Zoom.
Outside the remote camp, researchers sent parents a kit containing headphones, worksheets and books, as well as Play-Doh, toys and other fun items to use in class. For example, children used colored plastic eggs from the kit to ‘vote’ for the correct answer in their virtual classroom instead of raising a hand.
The reading camp grouped the children into six-person classrooms, each with two teachers who were trained in specific skill units in the lessons. The sessions lasted three hours a day, with several breaks, short lessons punctuated by activities, and ended with a reading session. Classrooms were often broken up into even smaller breakout rooms for three students, each with a teacher concentrating the lessons and games.
“This shows that we can actually educate kids online if we use the right methodology, engage them and interact socially with peers and teachers,” he said Yael Weiss-Zruya, research associate at I-LABS and first author of the study. “The combination of all these factors has led to success.”
Both in the reading camp and in the control group, the children took part in several standardized and non-standardized tests to assess their knowledge of letters, sounds and words. The results showed that the reading camp participants improved more than the children in the control group in all measured reading skills and in particular in their phonological perception and knowledge of lowercase letters and sounds.
“Honestly, I had my doubts that 5-year-olds could learn to read online without a live tutor. But when I saw these 5-year-olds laugh on Zoom and encourage each other to listen and hold up the right colored egg, I was amazed. Their social connections with one another were evident and their learning was incredible. They called each other by name and seemed very anxious to see each other on screen,” Kuhl said.
The researchers plan to hold additional online reading camps and add brain scans before and after the camps to assess how learning to read affects brain development.
The study was funded by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Petunia Charitable Fund.
Other co-authors were Suzanne Ender, Liesbeth Gijbels, Hailley Loop, Julia Mizrahi and Bo Woo, all I-LABS.
For more information, contact Weiss at ylweiss@uw.edu, Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu, or Yeatman at jyeatman@uw.edu.
Tag(s): College of Arts & Sciences • Institute for Linguistics and Hearing Sciences • I-LABS • Patricia Kuhl • Yael Weiss