Learning support
Some children find reading hard, or find it hard to stay focused through a lesson. C1 Ai has settings a parent can turn on for each child to make lessons easier to follow. This page explains what each setting does and the research it is based on.
What these settings are not. They are not a diagnosis, a treatment or a therapy for dyslexia, ADHD or any other condition, and C1 Ai is not a medical device. We never ask whether a child has a diagnosis: a parent simply chooses what helps. If you are worried about your child's reading or attention, please talk to their teacher, a doctor or an educational psychologist.
The settings
In the app: Settings → Children → (the child) → Learning support.
| Setting | What it does | What it is based on |
|---|---|---|
| Wider spacing | More space between letters, words and lines; no italics. | Extra letter spacing reduces "crowding" (letters too close to recognise easily), which affects readers with dyslexia more. In a study of 74 children with dyslexia it doubled reading accuracy and raised reading speed by more than 20% [1]. Line spacing of 1.5 or more and avoiding italics follow the British Dyslexia Association's style guide [2]. |
| Cream background | A soft cream background instead of bright white. | Recommended by the British Dyslexia Association's style guide to reduce glare [2]. A comfort setting; we do not claim it improves reading on its own. |
| Read aloud | A button next to questions and answer options that reads them aloud, in the lesson's language, on the device. | A meta-analysis of read-aloud and text-to-speech tools found a positive effect on reading comprehension for students with reading difficulties (average effect size d = 0.35) [3]. The tutor itself already talks, so most of a lesson needs no reading. |
| Short, one step at a time | The tutor asks one thing at a time in at most two short sentences, repeats the key instruction, and praises the specific thing the child did well. The lesson screen hides secondary buttons behind "More". | For children with attention difficulties, short tasks with immediate feedback and teacher-directed work keep attention better than long independent work [5]; classroom interventions built on consequences and self-regulation have the largest effects on off-task behaviour [4]. Fewer elements on screen also lowers the load on working memory. |
| Break reminder | After 10, 15 or 20 minutes the tutor finishes its sentence and the lesson pauses for a short break. | Short, bounded work periods with breaks are a standard classroom accommodation for attention difficulties [5]. We will measure whether it helps (below) rather than assume it. |
What we deliberately do not do
- No "dyslexia fonts". Two controlled studies found that the special fonts OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie did not improve reading speed or accuracy for children with dyslexia, and most children preferred an ordinary font [6][7].
- No "brain training" games. A meta-analysis of working-memory training found short-term gains on the trained tasks but no reliable transfer to reading, arithmetic or other real-world skills [8].
- No diagnosis, no guessing. We do not ask for a diagnosis (that would be health data under the GDPR) and we do not try to infer one from how a child behaves. The settings are ordinary preferences, stored with the child's other settings and deleted with them.
- No time pressure. No question in C1 Ai has a countdown.
How we check that it helps
Every lesson already has the same short check before and after it. With families who use these settings we compare, with and without them: the gain from the check before to the check after, how long the child stays in the lesson, and how often a lesson is left unfinished, together with what parents tell us. Settings that do not help will be changed or removed, and this page will say what we found.
References
- Zorzi, M., Barbiero, C., Facoetti, A., et al. (2012). Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(28), 11455–11459. Full text
- British Dyslexia Association (2023). Dyslexia Style Guide. PDF
- Wood, S. G., Moxley, J. H., Tighe, E. L., & Wagner, R. K. (2018). Does use of text-to-speech and related read-aloud tools improve reading comprehension for students with reading disabilities? A meta-analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(1), 73–84. Full text
- Gaastra, G. F., Groen, Y., Tucha, L., & Tucha, O. (2016). The effects of classroom interventions on off-task and disruptive classroom behavior in children with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analytic review. PLoS ONE, 11(2), e0148841. Full text
- LD OnLine. Helping the student with ADHD in the classroom: strategies for teachers. ldonline.org
- Wery, J. J., & Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(2), 114–127. Full text
- Kuster, S. M., van Weerdenburg, M., Gompel, M., & Bosman, A. M. T. (2018). Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 68(1), 25–42. Full text
- Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of "far transfer": evidence from a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534. Full text
Questions or suggestions, especially from teachers, therapists and parents: support@c1ai.org.