School Start Screening Tool

This paper concentrates on the implementation of a new screening method in Austrian schools to assess children and find out if they have any special educational needs in educational areas like phonology, counting, knowledge of letters and numbers and others. The underlying structure of the assignments was developed by developmental psychologists from the University of Graz and the University of Vienna and then implemented as a mobile application for Android tablets. For testing and evaluation purposes, the app’s prototype was first used voluntary by multiple Austrian schools. Furthermore, the mobile application had to be fully functional when offline as well as a central web application had to be developed to give the developmental psychologists access to the screening results. However, the main goal was to develop the application in a way that especially children without sufficient skills in reading and writing are able to understand the assignment’s tasks and to perform input