Remote Assessing Children's Handwriting Spelling on Mobile Devices

Assessment of children's spelling development stages is an activity frequent in literacy classrooms. Usually, teachers adopt dictation sessions, using a paper-and-pencil based method, which has to be conducted individually with each child. As there are many students in a class, the activity becomes laborious to be offered frequently, pushing teachers to opt to a sub-optimal amount of tests. Moreover, the number of tests to be performed in person is now limited. In this context, we aim to develop a method for conducting automated word dictation sessions for an in-person and remote assessment. Besides, our proposal aims to support teachers, parents, and other literacy professionals in identifying children's spelling development stages. In this paper, we report the conception of our computational artifact through the Design Science Research Methodology. After reviewing the existing studies, we developed a high fidelity prototype and evaluated the concept during a focus group discussion with literacy teachers. The collected qualitative result indicates the feasibility and utility of our approach, and evident limitations in existing apps to assess children's spelling, contributing to future research in this area.