Is Organizing Knowledge Effective in Primary Education?

Abstract

The acquisition of reading comprehension abilities and written expression is one of the key factors among learning processes in which students show many difficulties. For this reason, it is necessary to implement effective intervention strategies from early school years. The program EPI.com is aimed at improving lexical, semantic, and syntactic processes related to the reading process. This work aims to analyze the efficiency of EPI.com in years 1&2 of Primary Education. Participants in the research were 62 students (ages 6–8), who were assigned to an Experimental Group (EG; 38 students receiving the EPI.com intervention) and a Control Group (CG; 24 following traditional teaching and learning methods). The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities and the Peabody test were applied before and after the intervention was carried out. Results showed that the strategy was effective in EG in improving the psycholinguistic aspects measured by the ITPA, with better results in the variables related to syntactic and lexical processing. Taking the results into account, it was concluded that EPI.com allows students to improve the abilities relating to reading skills. Also, the results highlight the need to incorporate interventions aimed at favoring maturation in some key aspects at early ages.