ADPS - A Prescreening Tool for Students With Dyslexia in Learning Traditional Chinese

Prescreening children for specific learning disabilities, e.g., dyslexia, is essential for effective intervention. With a quick and reliable prescreening result, special education coordinators (SENCOs) can provide students with early intervention and relieve their learning pressure. Unfortunately, due to the limited resources, many students in Hong Kong receive dyslexia assessments beyond the golden period, i.e., under the age of six. To this end, information technology could establish automatic prescreening tools to address this issue. However, dyslexia prescreening for children learning Chinese is challenging due to the lack of sound-script correlation in Chinese. In this article, an automatic dyslexia prescreening system (ADPS) is developed to provide a quick test to identify at-risk children. Through a two-stage approach, we first develop a gamified tool based on linguistic characteristics and then evaluate the result by a comparison study. Results from a pilot test on 30 students with dyslexia and 32 students without dyslexia indicate that the ADPS can effectively distinguish between two groups of students. Furthermore, the interactive design elements can motivate students to conduct the prescreening independently.