Behavioural Science Institute

In the present article, the development of a child-friendly computer software program to enhance the early literacy skills of kindergarteners in the Netherlands is described. The ergonomic aspects of designing software for young children are described along with the content of the program in connection with the literature on early literacy. The results of two studies with immigrant kindergarteners trained using the story and the vocabulary part of the program are also reported. After a short amount of training, the vocabulary of the children was found to show significant gains. #

The present study examined the long-term effects of a computer intervention for the development of phonological awareness in Dutch kindergartners. Native Dutch and immigrant children worked with the software 15 min/week during one school year. Following a pretest – interim test – post-test – retention test design, the effects on rhyming, phonemic segmentation, auditory blending, and grapheme knowledge were assessed. The intervention showed significant immediate effects on rhyming and grapheme knowledge. The time spent on the computer games also correlated with the learning gains for the experimental group. In the first grade, retention effects were demonstrated after 4 months of formal reading education.

The present study investigated the effects on learning in a sheltered Internet environment using so-called WebQuests in elementary school classrooms in the Netherlands. A WebQuest is an assignment presented together with a series of web pages to help guide children's learning. The learning gains and quality of the work of 229 sixth graders participating in either a free-search Google condition or a closed-search WebQuest condition were compared. The closed-search condition showed the highest learning gains for boys. Children's information processing and linguistic skills generally influenced their learning gains and did not interact with condition. A difference in the quality of writing for the two conditions was also found with the language quality being higher in the free-search condition.

In the present study, intensive vocabulary training by computer was undertaken in a two-year kindergarten programme in the Netherlands. In the intervention, 67 native and immigrant children in the first and second years of kindergarten played vocabulary games on the computer twice a week for a period of 15 minutes over 15 weeks. A control group of 97 kindergartners followed the regular curriculum. In a pre-test-training-post-test-retention test design, positive effects of the computer training were found on a curriculum-dependent vocabulary test. A trend was found towards positive effects of the computer training on a curriculum-independent test for children in their second year of kindergarten. The results present an alternative and relatively teacherindependent method to enlarge children's vocabularies.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the possibilities for the assessment of growth in phonological awareness of children in kindergarten and first grade. Phonological awareness was measured using four sets of items involving rhyming, phoneme identification, phoneme blending, and phoneme segmentation. The results of an exploratory factor analysis and analyses conducted within the framework of item response theory showed one latent ability to underlie the different sets of items, which nevertheless differed in difficulty. Analyses in terms of the children’s ability further showed the phonological awareness measures to be sensitive to growth. The amount of information supplied by the different sets of items depended on the children’s level of ability. The conclusion that it is possible to accurately monitor the development of children’s phonological awareness in the early elementary grades appears to be justified, and this possibility opens up new perspectives for the early screening for reading problems and dyslexia.

Reading involves the decoding of written forms into language forms that represent phonological, morphological, and word level units. Thus, orthographies convey not only phonological but also morphological information-the word roots, syntactic inflections, and derivational relations that constitute the minimal semantic and grammatical units of a language. There are many psycholinguistic issues brought to light by the facts about morphology. However, the central one has focused on decomposition-whether and how language users, including readers, decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent morphemes.