Development and preliminary testing of tablet application to increase reading motivation and summarization for adolescent students with ADHD

Abstract

Children with ADHD have a variety of difficulties with reading, including phonetics, reading comprehension, distractibility, lack of reading organizational skills and a low ability to summarize. This study created a tablet-based reading application designed to enhance their capabilities in developing a multimodal approach to reading. Participants who demonstrated difficulty in completing a reading task in a book exhibited a positive outcome on wanting to complete the reading and tasks in the application and complete their summary writing. The application encourages participants to read, answer questions about what was read about the text, record the answers, access notes written, and it aids in summarization of collected sequential information. A rubric score were used to compare summary writing differences after reading from the book and reading with the application. It was determined that there wasn't significant total score differences between the two, but the rubric score demonstrated areas of improvement.