Empowering Neurodivergent Readers: The Role of AI-Personalized Stories in Supporting Literacy Development

This project will examine whether personalized, AI-generated stories in the StoryMii app can help children who have both ADHD and reading difficulties learn new words, comprehend stories, and stay engaged with reading. Children with these challenges often have trouble sustaining attention and decoding letters, so generic texts often cannot keep them engaged long enough to support learning. Personalized stories and multimedia supports, such as listening while reading, have been shown to help many children, but it is still unclear whether these benefits extend to children with both attention and reading difficulties. Over six months, the Mitacs intern will work with Western University and MiiApps, the company behind StoryMii, which creates custom AI-generated storybooks from user prompts. The intern will run an experiment testing whether personalization in StoryMii improves short-term word learning and story comprehension, and will also analyze anonymized data from roughly 16,000 StoryMii users to evaluate long-term reading engagement. The findings will provide MiiApps with its first scientific evidence on how well StoryMii supports neurodivergent learners, helping guide product design and strengthening its value for families, educators, and clinicians, while advancing research on children’s reading development.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ryan Stevenson

Student:

Partner:

MiiApps Inc.

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

The University of Western Ontario

Program: