Do children with reading difficulties benefit from instructional game supports? Exploring children's attention and understanding of feedback

This paper examines how primary aged children with reading difficulties attend to, understand and act upon different types of feedback within a digital literacy game. A systematic and structured video analysis of twenty-six children's game play was carried out focussing on moments where children made an error and were followed by in-game feedback. Our findings show that children benefited from outcome feedback, which supported an accurate interpretation of their game performance and prompted children to try again. In contrast, though the elaborative feedback attracted similar levels of attention, children struggled to understand the content, resulting in a reliance on implicit knowledge to correct their next response. Alongside identifying a set of new questions for future research, the study contributes a number of intrinsic and extrinsic recommendations for ensuring children with reading difficulties attend to and comprehend games-based feedback. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic? Outcome and elaborative feedback provided in games can scaffold the learner to recognise errors and apply corrective strategies. Elaborative feedback, in particular, has been evidenced to support the learner's understanding and lead to learning gains, albeit with older populations. What this paper adds? An empirical evaluation of how young children who struggle with reading attend to, understand, and respond to feedback in a digital literacy game. Demonstrates that children attend to the outcome and elaborative feedback to equal degrees, but struggle to understand and apply elaborative feedback due to its metalinguistic complexity. Implications for practice and/or policy? Games that embed outcome feedback visually in the target response can enhance the child's attention to, and understanding of, their performance. Games that offer verbal elaborative feedback require additional instruction to maintain children's focus on the feedback and to support content understanding.