Developing the capabilities of children to comprehend written texts is key to their development as young adults. Text comprehension skills develop enormously from the age of 7- 8 until the age of 11. Nowadays, several young children (˜5% – 10% of novice readers) turn out to be poor (text) comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference-making skills, despite proficiency in lowlevel cognitive skills like word decoding. Though there are several pencil-and-paper reading interventions for improving inference-making skills on text, and addressed to poor comprehenders, the design and evaluation of Adaptive Learning Systems (ALSs) are lagging behind. The use of more intelligent ALSs to custom-tailor such interventions in the form of games for poor comprehenders has tremendous potential. Our system embodies that potential. This paper presents the design of our ALS by focusing on its intelligent adaptive engine and the related conceptual models, and by presenting the visual interfaces for story telling and gaming.

We are working on a temporal reasoning web tool for 7-11 olds. The acquisition of temporal relations and reasoning with them depends on age and experience, as well as linguistic factors. We conducted a preliminary evaluation with 6–8 olds in order to assess whether and how they would visually represent “while” temporal relations of a story. In this paper, we present and discuss our experimental evaluation, which paves the way for the visual representation of such relations in our e-tool.

LODE is a web tool for children that are novice readers, and is primarily meant for deaf children. It proposes written stories and interactive games for reasoning, globally, on the stories. In this paper, first, we motivate the rationale of LODE, and explain its reasoning games. Then we briefly describe the design of the web client-server architecture of LODE; the server employs a constraint programming system for creating and solving the LODE games in real time. Finally, we concentrate on two evaluations of the latest prototype of LODE: one with hearing novice readers; another one with deaf readers. We conclude by discussing the results of the evaluations, and their implications for LODE.