Can struggling students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and/or language minorities improve their decoding skills in reading using GraphoGame, a computer-assisted reading intervention?

Abstract
Introduction
International research studies, such as PISA and PIRLS, have shown that students with disadvantaged socioeconomic status (SES) and with an immigrant background present lower reading comprehension. The literature indicates that a gap in reading performance exists between socioeconomically disadvantaged and advantaged students from the early stages of learning to read and that this gap is likely to persist in the absence of intervention.
The school environment is not always able to provide targeted intervention for students with reading difficulties. GraphoGame, a computer game focused on letter identification and word decoding, can effectively support reading acquisition, as suggested by studies in different languages and countries. However, few studies have focused on the potential value of GraphoGame as a reading intervention tool for students with decoding difficulties attending a low-SES school with a high proportion of language minority students, where instruction is provided in French.
Objective
The aim of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that using GraphoGame with struggling readers attending a low-SES school, who were mostly language minority students and who received French language instruction, improved basic reading skills. The participants were second-grade students with persistent decoding difficulties despite one year of reading instruction. We also assessed whether the difference in reading performance between the students identified in the study as struggling readers who benefited from GraphoGame and the students identified as the best readers was reduced on reading tasks.
Method
We compared, in a group of 20 students, the gains obtained with GraphoGame to the gains obtained with a control activity in different reading tasks (knowledge of letters, grapheme-phoneme conversions, pseudowords reading, GraphoGame words reading, text reading rate). For this purpose, we used a crossover design with two groups, two conditions (GraphoGame and a control activity) and two intervention periods of 5 weeks each. Both groups, matched on the different reading measures and on control measures (receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning), were assigned the two conditions successively but in a different sequence: one group practiced GraphoGame first and then the control activity, while the other group practiced the control activity first and then GraphoGame. Furthermore, during both intervention periods, all 20 students participated in sessions of reading remediation for half an hour a week. The results were analyzed with frequentist and Bayesian statistics.
Results
Statistical analyses indicated that the participants obtained better gains after the GraphoGame intervention than after the control activity on the different reading tasks. Moreover, the gap between struggling readers and best readers was reduced in the pseudowords reading task.
Conclusion
The study suggested that GraphoGame, when used in the school context, can improve the decoding and reading skills of struggling second-grade readers attending low-SES schools and mostly from language minorities who, without intervention, had made little progress in learning to read in their first year of schooling.