Video games help dyslexic kids' reading skills –study

A new study has emerged that suggests playing action video games can actually have positive effects on children with reading disabilities.

 

According to ScienceDaily and EurekAlert!, a study involving dyslexic children has demonstrated that children who spent at least 12 hours playing action video games experienced improved reading skills comparable to, if not better than, receiving an entire year of traditional reading therapy.

 

Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy watched two groups of children with dyslexia. The kids were made to play action and non-action video games for nine sessions, each sesssion lasting 80 minutes. The subjects were then tested for reading, phonological, and attentional skills. 

 

It turned out that the children who played the action video games read faster and more accurately afterwards. 

 

"Our study paves the way for new remediation programs, based on scientific results, that can reduce the dyslexia symptoms and even prevent dyslexia when applied to children at risk for dyslexia before they learn to read," Facoetti said.

 

In a previous study, Facoetti’s team observed that dyslexia may not be a language skills problem, but one linked to early visual attention ailments. Their recent study involving action video games further supports this notion.

 

"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," said Andrea Facoetti. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly." 

 

Facoetti hopes the results of their study encourages educational institutions to establish new remediation programs that can curtail symptoms of dyslexia and even arrest the development of dyslexia altogether in at risk children.

 

However, Facoetti himself emphasized that their study should not be used to promote unsupervised gaming. — TJD, GMA News