The impact of virtual reality on parents' awareness of cognitive perceptions of a dyslectic child.

Parents of dyslexic children encounter many difficulties in understanding
and accepting their children’s disability. This affects the child’s self-image and the
way s/he copes (Hallahan and Kauffman 1991; Einat 2003). The goal of this study
was to develop VR immersive simulated states. The simulation was designed to help
the parents of dyslexic children experience the kind of errors their children make
when reading. Two groups of parents of dyslexic children participated in this
experiment, an experimental group (N=37), which experienced ten 3D worlds
simulating different kinds of reading errors, and a control group (N=30), that
watched a movie describing and explaining similar errors. All the subjects were
administered a cognitive questionnaire (Shavit 2005) before and after the intervention.
In addition, the participants in the experimental group were interviewed before and
after the intervention. The results indicate that experiencing a variety of simulated
types of dyslexia with virtual reality can bring about improvement in parents’
awareness of the dyslexic child’s cognitive experiences, and that this improvement is
significantly greater than that achieved by watching a film about dyslexia.