Texas A&M Prof Gets $3.5-Million To Improve Student Reading Comprehension
A
professor at Texas
A&M University has been awarded a $3.5-million grant from the United States Department of Education's
Institute
of Education Sciences to continue developing a project to improve
reading comprehension
for fourth- and fifth-graders who go to school in high-poverty areas.
Kay
Wijekumar, a professor of teaching, learning
and culture at the College Station, TX, university first initiated her
Intelligent
Tutoring System for the Structure Strategy (ITSS) project in
2001
when she was teaching at Pennsylvania State University.
ITSS
is a Web-based digital tutor that teaches
students to examine the structure of content in order to increase their
reading
comprehension. The software is intended to show students how to look at
the way
a text is organized in order to understand its main idea, a concept
that many
students struggle with.
With
the ITSS software, a digital avatar appears
as a friendly high school student who leads the student through each
lesson. After
the student reads a short piece of text, the avatar leads him or her
through a
series of tasks. For instance, the student might be asked to describe
the
article's main idea or explain what is being compared.
Games
are also used as lessons. In one, a green
dragon walks through a series of boxes with words in them. When she
passes by
the signaling words, students are supposed to click on the box. The
dragon
might wander through boxes labeled "great" or "U.S.A." before passing
through "similarities,"
which the student would be expected to click on.
"Computers
are only helpful to the extent that
they can make us strategic thinkers and problem solvers," Wijekumar
said.
The
ITSS software has already been tested on 15,000
children in high-poverty schools in Pennsylvania, Michigan, California,
New
Mexico and Texas.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.