EVASION, attention et lecture

An educational game that trains visual attention for effective reading

EVASION is a fun educational application that trains children's visual attention to improve reading fluency.

How does it work?

In each of the 4 EVASION mini-games, the child's mission is to identify and “catch” sequences of target letters (for example, H D S) which move quickly on the screen. He must identify the targets very precisely to avoid other letter sequences, which are only distractors (for example, H S D). As the game progresses, the sequences of letters become longer and longer, the time to identify each sequence becomes shorter and shorter, and the targets become more and more similar to distractors. With increasing difficulty, the child must mobilize more and more visual attention. For personalized learning, the software includes an algorithm that adapts the difficulty of the game to the level of each player in real time. Visual attention is trained very gradually according to each person’s needs.

Is the training effective?

An experiment made it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of in-class training. The study was carried out with hundreds of first grade children, aged between 6 and 7 years old. Evaluations carried out before and after training show that children who trained with EVASION improved their visual attention. They are able to identify more letters at the same time; they read better and faster and have better scores in word dictation. This progress can be attributed to the application for three reasons:

(1) Children who used EVASION progressed more than children of the same age who used other software for the same training period;

(2) They also progress more than children who have not used any software but attend school regularly;

(3) Children who make more progress in reading and dictation when they have trained longer with EVASION.

How long is the training?

To be effective, training must be relatively intensive. It is recommended to offer 3 sessions of 15 to 20 minutes per week, for 10 weeks, or 10 hours of training in total. We know that less than 5 hours of training is not enough to achieve progress in reading and spelling.

Who is EVASION for?

ESCAPE involves an aspect of visual attention which is essential for learning to read. It is therefore recommended to use it at the start of learning (CP) with the aim of prevention. Use at the end of the main kindergarten section is also possible if the child has learned to recognize isolated letters. The software can also be offered to older children (CE or CM) who have learning difficulties.

What implementation in class?

EVASION was designed to be used relatively independently. The software is easy to use even for young children and the progress of the exercises is managed automatically, without requiring any special handling from the teacher. Teachers often choose small group use.

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Link to the popular scientific publication: https://fondamentapps.com/wp-content/uploads/fondamentapps-synthese-evasion.pdf

Link to the scientific article: https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rrq.576

To test EVAsion, go here: https://fondamentapps.com/#contact