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Digital literacy games can be beneficial for children with reading difficulties as a supplement to classroom instruction and an important feature of these games are the instructional supports, such as feedback. To be effective, feedback needs to build on prior instruction and match a learner's level of prior knowledge. However, there is limited research around the relationship between prior knowledge, instruction and feedback in the context of learning games. This paper presents an empirical study exploring the influence of prior knowledge on response to feedback, in two conditions: with or without instruction. Thirty-six primary children (age 8-11) with reading difficulties participated: each child was assessed for their prior knowledge of two suffix types--noun and adjective suffixes. They subsequently received additional instruction for one suffix type and then played two rounds of a literacy game--one round for each suffix type. Our analysis shows that prior knowledge predicted initial success rates and performance after a verbal hint differently, depending on whether instruction was provided. These results are discussed with regards to learning game feedback design and the impact on different types of knowledge involved in gameplay, as well as other game design elements that might support knowledge building during gameplay.

Background: Approaches to teacher professional development, such as learning designs (LDs), can facilitate primary school teachers' appropriation of literacy technology in the classroom. LDs are detailed learning activities and interventions designed by teachers to plan their use of technology. Methods: Using a creative design methodology to carry out a series of LD workshops with teachers, we aimed to understand how primary school teachers envision learning and teaching with two distinct technologies designed to support children's reading skills: a game and an e-reader. Employing systematic qualitative content analysis, we compared LDs developed by teachers for each technology. Results: Our study shows that while principles of teacher instruction are consistently incorporated across the LDs, the design of each technology plays an important role in how teachers plan their students' learning and focal reading skills. Further, teachers' perception of the technology is as important as the features of the design. Compared with the e-reader, the game is perceived as an individual practice activity with less opportunities to learn with peers. Finally, across both technologies, teachers envision supporting additional literacy skills, beyond those designed in the technology, highlighting the importance of explicitly facilitating LDs intended to foster within-subject learning. Conclusions: These findings raise a new set of considerations on how to support teachers to design literacy learning and teaching activities with technology, and also offer a new methodological approach to facilitate LDs in future research and teacher training.

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.

The use of learning games within the classroom is becoming increasingly common because of their potential to positively impact learning. Recent developments in adaptivity offer further possibilities to personalise learning by tailoring the game to an individual child's level or particular learning needs. However, designing an adaptive learning game is a complex process as many different game components have an impact on the provision of optimal challenge, crucial for maintaining player engagement, with limited prior work considering the multifaceted nature of this concept. This paper explores how to design for "challenge" within large-scale adaptive learning games through a case study focused on the design of a literacy game for three linguistically and cognitively diverse learner groups--novice readers, children with dyslexia and children learning English as a foreign language. In reflecting on our design process, we identify three key design tensions that arose: (a) supporting longer-term learning goals through game replayability; (b) fostering either replication or innovation in pedagogy through adaptivity rules; and (c) addressing diversity between learner groups. We present a set of design recommendations to guide researchers and designers in taking a multidimensional view of challenge when designing large-scale adaptive learning games.

Much research exists on the role of textual enhancement in instructed second language (L2) development, yet little is known about how its effectiveness is influenced by multiple exposures, whether it can facilitate the acquisition of L2 derivational morphology, and how it may affect child language learning. To fill these gaps, this study employed a six-week multiple-exposure design to investigate the extent which to textual enhancement can benefit children's knowledge of L2 derivational morphemes. The study employed a pretest-posttest design, with six treatment sessions. Participants were 91 L2 learners of English in two primary school EFL contexts (Romania, Sweden). In each context, participants were randomly assigned to two groups: the +highlight group received textually enhanced texts, whereas the --highlight group read unenhanced texts during the treatment. The children read the texts through a digital reader application during their English lessons. The target constructions were the "-ion" and "-ment" morphemes. The pretest and posttest included a non-word derivational suffix choice and a nonword derivational suffix decomposition task. Results of linear mixed effects models found a small advantage of textual enhancement for the acquisition of the "-ion" morpheme by Swedish learners on the suffix choice task, but Romanian learners showed no benefits from highlighting.

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6–9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them – vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal – to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]