May 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
IES Funded Projects
The Pennsylvania State University
Intelligent Tutoring Using the Structure Strategy to Improve Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students.Principal investigator: Bonnie Meyer
Online: www.ed.psu.edu/news/middlereading.asp
Some students fail to succeed in identifying main ideas from expository text and giving cohesive and complete accounts of what they read because of how they read. The investigators will address this reading comprehension problem through a Web-based intelligent tutoring intervention for middle school students. The Web-based intelligent tutor will teach students how to use text structures strategically when reading to support understanding and memory. It will also guide them through the process of identifying main ideas.
Carnegie Mellon University
Reader-Specific Lexical Practice for Improved Reading Comprehension.Principal investigator: Jamie Callan
Online: http://hartford.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Reap
Providing individually tailored reading practice may be the best way to support the development of reading comprehension. However, teachers are often not able to create individual reading lessons for each of their 20 to 30 students. Using recent improvements in computer science, this research project will develop a search engine tailored for selecting text passages that meet very detailed student information needs (e.g., texts on a particular topic, at a specific level of difficulty and exhibiting desired vocabulary patterns). The research will also develop a software application that identifies reading material using the Web that is tailored to each student's individual interests and reading level.
Northern Illinois University
Improving students' comprehension and construction of arguments.Principal investigator: Dr. Anne Britt
Online: www.niu.edu/index.html
High school and college students are expected to learn to comprehend and evaluate written arguments. Recent assessments, however, show that most students lack such skills. The primary objective of this study is to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an instructional program for teaching students to better comprehend and produce arguments using a Web-based tutoring system.
University of California, Los Angeles
Introducing desirable difficulties for educational applications in science.Principal investigator: Dr. Robert Bjork
Online: www.ucla.edu/
Laboratory research indicates that in many cases, interventions that appear to make learning more difficult and slow the rate of learning can actually be effective in enhancing long-term retention of information. The goal of this research is to determine whether the benefits of these "desirable difficulties," demonstrated in laboratory tasks, can generalize to realistic educational materials and contexts involving middle school and college students using the Web-Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) program.
Columbia University
Study Enhancement Based on Principles of Cognitive Science.