AN EVALUATION OF A MULTISENSORY SPEAKING-COMPUTER BASED SYSTEM (STARCROSS-IDL) DESIGNED TO TEACH THE LITERACY SKILLS OF READING AND SPELLING

The ''Indirect Learning'' (IDL) system is a speaking-computer based mu ltisensory system for teaching literacy skills, The IDL system has sev eral unique features: these are the facility to independently adjust t he colour of the monitor screen and the text colour, the masking of in correct typed responses, the incorporation of a touch-typing course in to a remedial programme, the echoing back of children's spoken respons es by the computer, and the integration of all these features into ove r one thousand carefully graduated exercises, This evaluation describe s the system and measures how effectively the system remediated the re ading and spelling in a sample of 150 children and adults, The effecti veness of the IDL system for different individuals varied between the extremes of having no significant effect and improving reading age at a rate of 6 months for one month of the programme, and spelling age by 6.6 months/month so that normal reading and spelling abilities were q uickly attained, The average rates of improvement for the group in rea ding and spelling were 2.15 and 2.17 months/month respectively. These results demonstrate that this learning system is effective, especially when it is considered that this sample had previous rates of reading gain of on average 0.58 months/month, and 0.49 months/month for spelli ng, This shows an average improvement in the rate of learning to read and spell by a factor of about 4 times, The resilience of the system i s demonstrated by the fact that the sample group were supervised by di fferent tutors in different teaching centres, and that the sample grou p had different needs, The variation of responses within the sample gr oup to the IDL programme were found to be correlated to factors that a re known to contribute to poor reading skills, eg, having poor phonolo gical skills and/or Meares-Irlen Syndrome (Wilkins, 1996), the age of the subject, and the quantity of exercises completed.