Comprehension and reading skills of preschool and elementary school children

Due to the ever-increasing attention that digitization has received in recent years from politics and the media, more and more areas of everyday life are being reached and taken over by it. As a result, children are also being confronted with media such as cell phones and tablets at an ever earlier age. Thus, there are already various applications that pursue the concept of reading promotion or pre-reading, but no application that functions cooperatively between different age groups.

This work presents a design concept for cooperative reading between preschool and elementary school children, where preschool children can train their comprehension skills and elementary school children can further improve their reading skills. Elementary school children can record their voice reading  text passages aloud, which are then presented to the connected preschool child as the story is read aloud.

The aim of this research is to investigate the concept just described in terms of cooperative learning. For this purpose, this concept was implemented in the form of an application and evaluated in family tests and with experts. Results show that the designed and digitally implemented concept is suitable for cooperative learning between children of different age groups. The participating children enjoyed using the application and being integrated into a story or being presented with a story in familiar voices.