Development and Validation of Digital Tutorial to Facilitate Pre-reading Skill

Abstract

The aim of the study was to develop a digital tutorial to facilitate training in pre-reading skills in young children and to test its ecacy. The present study was carried out in two phases. Phase I involved the preparation of the digital tutorial based on the intervention module for pre-reading skill. Phase II involved testing the ecacy of the developed digital tutorial. A group of 15 typically developing children in the age range of 1-6 years participated in the phase I of the study and 6 children with bilateral severe hearing impairment in the age range of 3-7 years participated in the phase II of the study. The participants with hearing impairment were divided into two groups of three each. In addition six adults (two speech-language pathologists, two special educators and two mothers of children with hearing impairment) were also selected as participants to train the two groups of children. One group was provided with only a text based intervention module to facilitate pre-reading skills, while the other group was provided with the text based intervention module as well as the digital tutorial. The outcome of the phase I was the digital tutorial material comprising of two DVDs. The results of the phase II revealed that the group trained using the digital tutorial along with the intervention module showed better gains revealing the eectiveness of the video mode in training literacy activities in children.