Find out what helps—not just what gets clicked.
A practical plan for small, facilitated reader sessions. It prepares a route to evidence; it is not a report of completed testing or a statistically powered study.
Before any session
- Agree the organiser, scope, accessibility arrangements and appropriate consent/assent and safeguarding process. Young people participate with the necessary adult involvement; withdrawal or skipping has no penalty.
- Seek varied digital confidence and access needs. Include older participants, young people with appropriate adults, and intergenerational pairs without treating a small convenience sample as representative.
- Use only fictional cards. No accounts, real messages, contact numbers, private records, recordings or names on observation sheets are needed.
- Agree how anonymous notes will be stored, who can access them and when they will be deleted. Do not collect participant information through mission pages or submit child answers to the site.
A suggested session sequence
Use the separate new-situation cards after one worked mission. Keep its explanation out of view until the participant has had the choice to explain their next action.
- Orient: explain the choice to stop and the fictional setting. Ask which format is comfortable; offer print, read-aloud or Comfort view.
- Start: invite a general description of how they would check the kind of situation, without asking about personal experiences. Avoid telling them the correct answer first.
- Observe: try one mission. Note where navigation, wording or access needed help. Do not turn silence or a slower pace into a failure score.
- Transfer: close the worked answer and use the mission's new fictional situation. Invite the participant's own next action before revealing choices or reasoning. Record only an anonymous observation: independent explanation, explanation with help, or declined/not observed.
- Debrief: ask what was useful, confusing or unnecessary. If appropriate consent and arrangements exist, a later fictional follow-up can explore recall; there is no automatic contact or follow-up system here.
Blank observation sheet
What a responsible report includes
State the recruitment method, resources/edition, session conditions, number invited and participating, missing observations and assistance. Report what changed after feedback. Separate observed task behaviour from satisfaction and self-reported confidence.
Do not infer a causal learning gain, lasting scam resistance or population-wide effectiveness from a few sessions. No names, quotes or stories are published without the appropriate separate permission. Human review and reader testing remain pending until actual work is completed and recorded.
Current status: protocol drafted; no cohort recruited, sessions completed or outcomes measured by AI Down Under. Recruitment, consent, delivery and any evidence report require a real organiser.