Dyslexia is a reading and writing disability that affects many primary school students in Hong Kong. Without early intervention, students often face major obstacles early in their lives and fall behind in learning, leading to poor academic performance. In Hong Kong, due to a lack of resources, students with dyslexia have to wait in line from 18 months to 4 years to be assessed. There are some screening tools on the market in the western context. However, dyslexia is a language-based learning disability [1]. Hong Kong students are best suited for pre-screening in the Chinese context. There is no comprehensive dyslexia pre-screening tool on the Hong Kong market. Therefore, we have developed a novel Chinese app that can pre-screen students with dyslexia at an early stage. In this research,...[ Read more ]

Dyslexia is a reading and writing disability that affects many primary school students in Hong Kong. Without early intervention, students often face major obstacles early in their lives and fall behind in learning, leading to poor academic performance. In Hong Kong, due to a lack of resources, students with dyslexia have to wait in line from 18 months to 4 years to be assessed. There are some screening tools on the market in the western context. However, dyslexia is a language-based learning disability [1]. Hong Kong students are best suited for pre-screening in the Chinese context. There is no comprehensive dyslexia pre-screening tool on the Hong Kong market. Therefore, we have developed a novel Chinese app that can pre-screen students with dyslexia at an early stage. In this research, we first define the basic criteria of Chinese words used by students, including the Sentence Reading Test, the Handwriting Test, and the Language Test. Additionally, we have defined the scoring and labelling criteria for AI analytics. Second, we designed six test types in the form of games in mobile application for students to play to extract their language test, sentence reading test and handwriting test data. Third, we designed a mobile application based on six types of tests and developed a database system to effectively extract the information needed for artificial intelligence analysis from the test data. We recruited 20 elementary school students (8 students with dyslexia) from local schools. The results show that students with dyslexia write more slowly than students non-dyslexia, especially the new Chinese characters they have just learned. In addition, the components-not-in-ratio is an important symptom, with a score of 0.53 vs. 0.59, used for the pre-screening of dyslexia and non-dyslexia. We believe that this application can help teachers efficiently and effectively pre-screen students with dyslexia.