Handouts are available below

Big Idea

Are you looking for a way to improve student reading comprehension in your science classroom? Have you tried Bionic Reading? It’s an app that bolds the first few letters of each word in a text – and it’s theorized to help individuals read faster and comprehend more. Does it work in the science classroom? We tried it with our science students, and we invite you to use our handouts to do the same with yours.

Watch the video to see how we set up our class experiment

Episode Notes

• According to their website, Bionic Reading is supposed to guide the eyes through text with artificial fixation points. As a result, the reader is only focusing on the highlighted initial letters and lets the brain center complete the word.
• For students with ADHD, who may be sensitive to a lot of stimulus, the bolded letters may help to ground them to the text. When I asked my students – many of whom did not have ADHD but used bionic reading for my experiment – how they felt using Bionic Reading, many echoed the same thing: that their eyes were able to skip over words more quickly and their minds able to predict the words. This supports that idea that Bionic Reading may help engage the mind more during reading.
• My preliminary results – which include 132 students from Grade 8 to 12 – show that students who used bionic reading – on average – 10 seconds faster with the approximately the same test accuracy compared to those students who didn’t use bionic reading.

Thanks for watching, and let’s talk science education again soon.

Resources

Handout(s): Ep57 Handout – Can Bionic Reading Improve Comprehension in the Science Classroom

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