Reading Improvement Among a Population Diagnosed with Attention Defecit Disorder and/or Dyslexia.

It is estimated that up to 15% of the student population in western society suffer from some form of learning disability. Recent studies have shown that up to 60% of the children in the US with problems of this nature go undiagnosed. For those that are fortunate enough to get help, it's often only in the form of medication, which while often of great benefit doesn't help the student with new skills to build confidence and tools to cope with the extra demands they face.

The most common of these disorders are the various forms of Dyslexia and Attention Defecit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) but often included under the same umbrella are gifted children bored at the pace of the class. For millions of students and their parents the impact of these disorders can be devastating. For the child, the desire to learn... something instinctive in all children, gradually turns to dread as their confidence erodes in repeated classroom failure. For parents there is often a sense of helplessness as they watch their child struggle. What's needed is more and different kinds of assistive technology. RapidReader is one such tool that shows great promise in helping kids and adults cope with learing disabilities.

The following is an informal, brief summary of a study conducted at the University of Southern California where students diagnosed with a range of learning disabilties given standardized reading comprehension tests. A comparison was then made between the test performance results when the student read the material in paper form versus reading at a generally greater rate of reading speed using RapidReader on a computer screen. The results as you will see below were very gratifying. It has been suggested that the significant improvement in comprehension may be due to the words being processed in a different part of the brain, as was shown in previous studies at Johns Hopkins University or the improvement may be due to increased focus and attention paid to a dynamically moving text display. In any case, the results indicate that RapidReader may offer substantial benefit for this population of students.

Overview
During the course of hundreds of product demonstrations and through the process of development of RapidReader¨ we at SoftOlogy™ began to encounter an intriguing and wonderful body of anecdotal evidence; RapidReader appears to have an immediate benefit for individuals who identified themselves as having been diagnosed as dyslexic or ADD/ADHD. For many ADD adults, and parents of ADD children it was a profound discovery that explained so much about the struggles encountered in the world of school and work. It was particularly gratifying for SoftOlogy IdeaWorks to learn that RapidReader could offer a powerful assist to those who have struggled with reading and learning from text.

SoftOlogy commissioned an external pilot study, to be conducted at the University of Southern California into whether RapidReader offered a true quantifiable benefit to those diagnosed with Dyslexia and/or ADD/ADHD. We are pleased to present the very encouraging results of this admittedly preliminary study. But as our mission is to provide a computer enhanced learning environment, the decision was made to make this aspect of the efficacy of RapidReader for special populations known even as more extensive study continues into the question of "why" RapidReader works. It is our hope that over time we can contribute some additional science to the body of knowledge regarding the mechanisms of learning disabilities. In the mean time we offer a software display methodology, inexpensive and installable on most Windows and Mac OS X computers that appears from the evidence to offer a real world benefit to those children and adults who are identified as "learning disabled".

THE STUDY:
In brief:
The study was a within-group repeated measures design n=26. Two editions of the Nelson-Denny Standardized Reading Comprehension Test were used as the measure of change. The subject group was a mixture of college students who had been diagnosed with Dyslexia and/or ADD/ADHD and were all capable readers of English. The test compared the subjects comprehension level when reading the test material in print on paper in their normal fashion to reading comparable test material using the RapidReader¨ methodology on a the computer screen.

•In a subjective questionnaire ( scale of 1-5, 5 being "strongly agree" ) there was a very high value (mean=4.125 out of 5) when asked if the subjects felt that they would benefit from the use of RapidReader¨ in overall speed increase and for academic reading.

Other Considerations:
Divergence with real world use model to prevent confounding factors:

The results of the study were very encouraging however there are use factors that for purposes of the study design were substantially different from using RapidReader as a self selected reading option. These include:

1) The speed was fixed at 300 wpm and participants were not allowed to vary the speed of the RapidReader display as they would be able to in real use.

2) No training or preparation was given prior to RapidReader display of the testing sample text. In the real world, users have the opportunity to take a brief tutorial which advances their reading speed in increments and then uses a "flooding" proceedure to develop comfort at accelerated reading speeds.

3) Screen size, font size and other options were fixed in the study model where as customization is present in the real product.

4) Neither the ParagaphView nor back/forward navigation were available to the subject if they missed something or wanted to reread. In the real product, this view is available at any time by double clicking or pressing the spacebar ot other keyboard commands while in the TurboView.

These issues all speak to a significant component of the study: the subjects lack of control over the experience. In more recent subjective studies, the consistent evidence is that when given a sense of command with choice over the "look and feel" of the RapidReader text display and the selection of speed, the users performance and comfort increases significantly.

The Future:
SoftOlogy plans to continue with a series of larger studies. In addition to further validation of the basic paradigm, we hope that inquiries into the question of why this type of display seems to benefit this population may yield some additions to the literature of the study of language processing.