Improving early phoneme skills with a computer program: Differential effects of regulatory skills

Supporting executive functions during children's preliteracy learning with the computer

“…This insight is important because children need to repeatedly rehearse to learn from tasks, while these findings show that attention quickly fades when the initial challenge of a game diminishes. A direct link of EFs and behaviour to preliteracy gains from a computer program, to the best of our knowledge, have only been studied by Kegel et al (2009). Their results indicated that kindergartners with lower levels of EFs showed more irrelevant random mouse clicks, spent more time on the games and made more mistakes.…”

“…This fits with previous studies that show that children with better involvement of their EFs are better able to inhibit irrelevant mouse responses. Moreover, it adds to this literature in explicitly linking EFs that are measured prior to the intervention (cf., Kegel et al, 2009;De Koning-Veenstra, Timmerman, Van Geert, & Van der Meulen, 2014) and in the behavioural effect when explicitly supporting EFs (cf., Van de Sande et al, 2015). The results are also the first to show the Passive Dissipation effect in a naturalistic educational context (Simpson et al, 2012), by having children take small delays that effectively faded their first prepotent response while working with educational software.…”

“…Such learning places high loads on the executive functions (EFs) of these young children (Van de Sande, Segers, & Verhoeven, 2015). Previous research has shown that especially children with lower levels of EFs are less engaged in software to stimulate preliteracy, with less learning gains as a result (Kegel, Van der Kooy-Hofland, & Bus, 2009). However, these are exactly the children that need the extra practice most to avoid magnifying learning gaps over time (Stanovich, 1986).…”

The Role of Executive Functions for Dyadic Literacy Learning in Kindergarten

“…A strict observation protocol was designed for the purposes of the current study and was based on previous empirically observed behaviors in interventions that focused on EF Kegel et al, 2009;Van de Sande et al, 2016). The annotation categories were off-task talking (i.e., talking that was irrelevant to the task at hand), off-task behaviors (e.g., looking away), number of literacy games played per session, mistakes (corrected for number of items), questions asked to the experimenter, and number of times the experimenter had to intervene to keep children engaged.…”

ICTs and Special Education in Kindergarten

“…Moreover, according to Kegel et al [24] , computer programs can be used to stimulate early phoneme skills of poorly performing kindergarten children and can help children with poor regulatory skills(inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility). Although their current results show that children with poor regulatory and literacy skills did not benefit from the computer intervention they used (internet program called 'Living Letters), conclude saying that this program can be used as a diagnostic tool to detect poor regulatory skills in kindergarten children as well as a valuable teaching aid.…”