By: Inas Essa

While your child is challenging his/her enemy in a videogame and focusing on how to defeat them and win, with increased attention, you may find this to be just fun and entertainment for the child. However, could you ever imagine that video games could play a role in improving reading skills?

A new study confirms that this is indeed the case. The new study from the University of Geneva shows that children’s reading abilities, as well as attentional and planning skills, could be improved through a new child-friendly action video game.

Reading Several Executive Functions

Reading is a basic part of literacy that does not only rely on oral language abilities; it also requires other executive functions. Attention control and flexibility are key elements in reading that are required to filter out distractors and successfully decode the text on crowded pages. As such, attentional control is highly important to group letters into words and phrases, besides swiftly moving from one line to another, and flexibly switching between different information to be extracted from the same string of letters.

"Reading calls upon several other essential mechanisms that we do not necessarily think about, such as knowing how to move our eyes on the page or how to use our working memory to link words together in a coherent sentence," indicates Daphné Bavelier, a professor in the Psychology Section of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE) at the UNIGE. "These other skills, such as vision, the deployment of attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, are known to be improved by action video games," explains Angela Pasqualotto, first author of the current study.

A previous study has shown that poor-readers face a higher risk of struggling at school and in life. Therefore, in the last decades, several reading acquisition models have emerged, highlighting the importance of oral language skills, for an appropriate development of reading skills during childhood.

Developing Videogames that Supports Learning

Previous research has identified how action-based videogames could benefit dyslexic children in increasing reading speed without remarkably altering reading accuracy. So, the new study, which involved 151 typically reading children has focused on evaluating the videogames effect on typically developing children and how training attentional control would result in enhancements in reading abilities.

The researchers developed a videogame-based cognitive intervention that consisted of action videogames and mini-games that aimed at improving reading different executive functions, such as working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. This game is composed of mini-games that apply gamified versions of standard clinical exercises linked through a game environment, without incorporating violence, with action videogame dynamics.

"The universe of this game is an alternative world in which the child, accompanied by his Raku, a flying creature, must carry out different missions to save planets and progress in the game," explains Angela Pasqualotto. "For example, the Raku flies through a meteor shower, moving around to avoid those or aiming at them to weaken their impact, while collecting useful resources for the rest of the game, a bit like what you find in action video games."

The participants, aged 8 to 12 years old, were divided into two groups: the first one played the videogame developed by the team, and the other played Scratch, a game that teaches children how to code. While both games require attentional control, they differ from one another. The action videogame requires children to perform tasks within a limited time frame, such as remembering a sequence of symbols or responding only when the Raku makes a specific sound. However, Scratch requires planning, reasoning, and problem-solving. 

"First, we tested the children's ability to read words, non-words and paragraphs, and also we conducted an attention test that measures the child's attentional control, a capacity we know is trained by action video games," says Daphne Bavelier. After that, for six weeks, 2 hours per week, the children followed the training with either the action videogame or the control game. Finally, children were tested at school by clinicians of the Laboratory of Observation Diagnosis and Education.

Near and Far Benefits

Research findings demonstrate that the action videogame group  benefited more in comparison to the other group, which played both Scratch. The action videogame group showed better enhancements in attentional control, as well as greater improvements in reading speed and accuracy. Moreover, these enhancements were maintained 6 months after the end of the training. The most interesting thing about this is that, while action videogames can improve reading skills, they do not require any reading activity.

References

nature.com
unige.ch