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Technology plays an increasingly important role in educational practice, including interventions for struggling learners (Torgesen et al., 2010; de Souza et al., 2018). This study focuses on the efficacy of tablet-based applications (see Word Reading, Grapholearn, and an experimental word-level program) for the purpose of supplementing early English literacy intervention with primary grades 1 and 2 children. The children were identified for learning support programs within Singaporean schools, which follow a bilingual policy, meaning children were learning reading in English plus an additional language. One hundred forty-seven children across seven schools participated (Mean age = 6.66). Within learning support classrooms, triplets of students matched on basic reading skills were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) phoneme-level, (2) rime-level, or (3) word-level focused interventions. All groups performed reading skills activities on iPads, across two phases over a 14-week period. Assessments for word reading accuracy and fluency, pseudoword decoding accuracy and fluency, and spelling were administered at four time points, pre- and post-intervention. Additional baseline measures were taken to assess individual differences in phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, general cognitive ability, statistical learning, and bilingual vocabulary knowledge. Mixed model analysis was conducted on the pre- to post-test measures across the two phases of the intervention (focused on accuracy then fluency). All groups made gains across the different literacy measures, while the phoneme-level intervention showed an advantage over the rime-level intervention, but not the word-level intervention, for decoding. There were also moderating effects of individual differences on outcomes. The general pattern of results showed an advantage of the word-level intervention for those with poorer phonological awareness for reading fluency; and a phoneme-level intervention advantage for those with poorer statistical learning ability. Children’s bilingual group (English plus Mandarin, English plus Malay, or English plus Tamil) also showed differential effects of the type of intervention (e.g., phoneme- or word-level) on different outcome measures. These results, along with data collected from the tablets during the intervention, suggest the need to examine the interplay between different types of technology-based interventions and individual differences in learning profiles.

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Grade 1 responders and non-responders to an iPad-based reading intervention were evaluated on their cognitive attributes. Cognitive measures included phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal memory and statistical learning, which were correlated with a lack of response to reading interventions in previous studies (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006). The overall research question was whether and which of the cognitive variables could differentiate treatment responders versus non-responders, since this would provide valuable information in predicting which children may be better served by different types of intervention. The intervention study was conducted as a randomized controlled design, wherein 147 children (Mage = 6.75) who were identified as at risk for reading difficulties at primary school entry were allocated to either phonics or word reading based interventions. Responders included children who attained criterion-referenced word reading and fluency and decoding accuracy and fluency scores (e.g., above grade equivalent scores or above a mean of typically developing peers), whereas nonresponders did not attain age-based scores at post-intervention compared with their preintervention scores. Four separate MANCOVA analyses were conducted to determine if nonresponders differed from their peers on any of the cognitive measures. The two groups differed only on the fluency outcomes. On the reading fluency task, non-responders varied from the other groups on their phonological awareness and verbal memory scores. For decoding fluency outcomes, responders and non-responders differed only on rapid automatized naming. Altogether, these findings do suggest differences between the groups, suggesting implications of building on cognitive skills together with language skills for children with reading difficulties.