A Breakthrough for Josh

A Breakthrough for Josh:

How Use of an iPad Facilitated Reading Improvement

 

By Barbara McClanahan, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Kristen Williams, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Ed Kennedy, Grandview Public School, OK and Susan Tate, Swink Public School, OK

  This article is about the use of an I-Pad to facilitate reading development in a student with ADHD and a significant delay in reading.  The student was paired with a pre-service teacher who was able to work with him twice a week for 20 minutes, for five weeks.  The teacher created an extremely well-planned tutoring program.  She started with a pre-test to determine the student's exact areas of need, and developed tutoring sessions that used research-based methods to address those areas.  The tutoring sessions were highly structured, with a mini-lesson on a particular skill,  a reading passage that allowed the skill to be practised, and a follow-up assessment.

The pre-service teacher found that using traditional methods to teach skills, such as paper-based matching of compound words, was not effective, mostly because the student was not able to focus.  When she used similar activities on the I-Pad, the student was engaged, and reported that he understood the concepts better.  At the end of the tutoring sessions, the student had improved one year in his reading level.

I found this article interesting because the student, Josh, reminded me of many students I have had in my own classes.  That combination of ADHD with low literacy skills is a common one, as is the difficulty of remedial work due to the lack of focus from the student.  What interested me, too, was how the I-Pad was seen at the beginning as simple a "reward".  If the student worked well in the first part of the session, he would get to play on the I-Pad in the second part.  It was only when the pre-service teacher started using the I-Pad as an instructional tool in itself that she started seeing progress.  In our school, the I-Pads are often used for games, as rewards, by the students.  This article made it very clear that there is a strong educative function to the I-Pad.  The pre-service teacher was able to download many programs from the Internet which specifically addressed the student's reading deficiencies, and did so in a way that was clearly engaging for that student.  The conclusion was that it was the I-Pad itself, with its touch-screen functions, use of visuals and sound, and immediate feedback, that made the difference.  In particular, there was a program that allowed the student record his own voice while reading, that forced him to think about what he was reading, and how he was reading, that had a strong effect on his comprehension.

What is also very clear from this article was that the student's progress in reading was the result of a combination between the use of the I-Pad and a structured, one-to-one tutoring program.  In the absence of the one-to-one guidance, the I-Pad would not have been effective.  And since there was a sample size of exactly one, the results from this "study" cannot be extrapolated at all.  I can give you many examples of individual students who have responded extremely well to various sorts of one-to-one or small-group tutoring sessions, using a variety of methods, with and without technology.  To use this study as justification for the purchase of I-Pads for a school without a concurrent investment in human resources would be misguided.

I would be interested to learn more about the use of the I-Pad in small-group reading sessions that could eventually proceed with only marginal support from a teacher.  We do have six I-Pads in our school.  So if we could have just a few very well-designed and easy-to-use programs on them, I could envision having a small group doing twenty minutes of I-Pad work while I read with another group.