Speakers
Description
The number of 10-year-old boys and girls with reading comprehension difficulties increased from 57% in 2019 to about 70% in 2022 in low- and middle-income countries according to the World Bank. The effects of this literacy crisis have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased learning deficits and social disparities (Betthäuser, Bach-Mortensen & Engzell, 2023). Effective and accessible assessment tools are crucial to help reduce the current crisis related to low literacy levels in Italy where, during the pandemic, Italian second-grade pupils reported a loss of half their annual academic performance (Contini et al. 2022).
The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR, https://roar.stanford.edu) is an efficient and reliable measure of reading abilities (Gijbels et al., 2023; Ma et al., 2023; Yeatman et al., 2021), approximating in-person standardized tests with high accuracy (r=0.94). This open-access online platform can be flexibly adapted into other languages, and several adaptations are ongoing.
We present the Italian adaptation of the Lexical Decision (LD) task of the ROAR. The task, which is embedded in a fun, animated story to ensure maximal engagement, is a forced choice LD task with words and pseudowords adhering to Italian phonotactic properties. The adaptation is currently being validated on adults and primary school children aged 6-11.
The creation of an open-access, freely available, and multilingual assessment tool which can be accessed from different countries through a unique web app is a practical alternative to resource-intensive, in-person reading assessments for both educational and research purposes.
