Are you looking for a great way to address answering simple questions and improving sequencing words and phrases into sentences? Then, Comprehension Builder by Abitalk may be just what you need on your device! This handy app is available on both Apple and Android devices. The developers were kind enough to provide me a redemption code for review. No other compensation was received and all opinions here are solely and unbiasedly mine. Let's take a closer look at what this program can do for you.
First, you can create a user account or sign in as a guest. The benefit to creating an account is you can collect and store data for individual clients/users.
Next, you have options to adjust your settings to best meet your needs. For example, you can have questions read aloud, give voice to words and phrases when tapped, or hear audio reinforcement when questions are answered accurately. These are just a few options to toggle "on" or "off." The image below shows more selections available in settings.
Now that you are ready to play, simply select which of the three levels you would like. The first level is the easiest introductory one that offers matching highlighted lines for sequencing the sentence. First, the user is asked a few "wh" questions for which he or she selects the correct answer by tapping the appropriate phrase. This level would have been perfect for several of my young, nonverbal clients who are not yet reading, had visuals been available with the phrases.
Level two proceeds in a similar manner as level one except you will not see color coded lines for phrase ordering a sentence.
Finally, level three prompts users to make a sentence about a picture given an array of words. This level was particularly hard for one of my 11 year old language clients, while levels one and two were very easy. I would like to see a transition to this level such as the option to have color coded lines for sentence formation in future app updates.
Users are given an opportunity to select from a number of "wh" question formats as pictured below. Scores can be found in this report section. Since I am likely to use this app as just part of my hour long speech and language session, I would like to see the developers adjust the total number of items to 20 as opposed to 30, 44, 52, or 57 in order for me to give some feedback after 10 minutes participation.
Overall, I liked this app because it offered three difficulty levels; a great number of tasks for working on answering questions; and an opportunity to sequence phrases or words in grammatically correct sentences. I would be able to use Comprehension Builder with more clients on my private caseload if picture symbols were used with words. It is my understanding that this app is just the beginning for these developers and we should expect to see much more from them in the future!
