This was our first meeting this school year and thus we summarized last year outcomes and planned next project steps for the following months. We already have analysis of the assessment data collected with our second graders and third graders who trained their reading with Karaton.

Karaton

We got assessment data from 99 pupils, i.e. 59 second graders (12 trained with Karaton; 47 served as controls), and 40 third graders (10 trained with Karaton; 30 pupils were controls).  We could see statistical improvements in their reading skills, especially decoding. Furthermore, we could observe significant increases in decoding skills of pupils involved in the intervention group, especially in the second grades. Even though the data are only preliminary and covered a low number of children, we could conclude that Karaton apparently positively affected pupils’ decoding skills. It showed more intense impact on second graders, which could be rather easily explained as the they are at a developmental stage when decoding is more practised and Karaton minigames corresponded with their skills and learning activities.

Therefore, we decided to continue our Karaton trainings with other groups of second graders from all COP schools. We are going to collect more pretest data at the beginning of November and the interventions should start in the second half of November and last until March 2024. We will then collect the posttest data.

Our next important project step is to summarize COP’s experience from schools which implemented a reading app with their pupils. We decided to organize a focus group which will serve as a source of further information for a teacher guide that should be created in the project and available to other schools and teachers who plan to use a similar reading app (possibly Karaton) in their classes.

‍Main points of our discussion:

• The teachers will collect more assessment data and more experience about training with pupils to gain solid information on the use of Karaton within lessons.
• We could see the impact of Karaton on our pupils last year.
• The developers of Karaton released its new version which seems rather different from the previous one. The teachers are eager to see the feedback from children and they also want to discuss some of the aspects of the game with the author.
• The project plans a whole AdAPPtive meeting in Dublin in April 2025. All our COP members are looking forward to going there.
• We would like to have results of our intervention study as well as main points of the guide for teachers ready by the time of the meeting in Dublin and share them with colleagues from partner countries.

And last but not least, one of our COP members gave birth to a baby boy just at the time of our October meeting. Congratulations! Welcome to the world, little Jonatan. As a result, we also welcomed our new colleague who substituted the happy mother in our group 😊.

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