IMPACT OF A VIRTUAL ZOO ON THE LEARNING AND EFFECTIVENESS MOTIVATION OF CHILDREN WITH READING DIFFICULTIES IN THE INITIAL PHASE OF LITERACY

• Autor(a) principal: Miranda Domingues, Andréia
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/48749
• topic: Elementary Education; Human-computer Interface; Interactive Learning Environments; Media in Education; Teaching/learning Strategies

In this paper, it was verified the effectiveness of a virtual zoo in the learning (reading) process of children in the initial phase of literacy. Pre- and post-test were applied using a synthetic didactic material, in which the linguistic capacity of letter recognition is considered. The pre-test was performed by 74 children between seven and nine years old, 37 girls and 37 boys. Twenty of these children, 12 girls and 8 boys, showed reading difficulties. These children performed the post-test after using the virtual zoo. They were separated into two groups, experimental (GE) and control (GC), with GE performing all phases of the virtual zoo (being, word recognition, syllables and letters of the alphabet), while CG used only the letter recognition. The number of attempts was recorded. The T-Student statistical test showed that the virtual zoo provided a significant improvement (bilateral p ≤0.05) in the post-test in relation to the pre-test. During the intervention with the virtual zoo, aspects of children’s motivation / playfulness and behavior were also evaluated. The results showed that the implemented characteristics acted significantly different in the motivation of girls and boys.