May 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR
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IES Funded Projects
IES has allocated $26,640,663 to 20 different universities and independent research organizations for various technology-based research projects as part of its mission to "improve education at all levels." The amount of the grants awarded ranges from $250,000 to $5,999,744. The grantees and a summary of their projects follow.
1. CAST Inc.
Reading to learn: Investigating general and domain-specific supports in a technology-rich environment with diverse readers learning from informational text.
Project focus: Develop a computer-based instructional approach that will support readers at risk for literacy difficulties and will accelerate their development of reading comprehension, especially for informational text.
2. University of Colorado
Research on and with novel educational technologies for comprehension.
Project focus: Develop a series of computer-managed instructional activities that will help middle school, high school and college students with limited vocabularies acquire substantially larger vocabularies necessary for high-level comprehension.
3. University of Memphis
Coh-metrix: Automated cohesion and coherence scores to predict text readability and facilitate comprehension.
Project focus: Develop two automated tools to enable writers, editors and educators to more accurately estimate the appropriateness of a text for their audience and to pinpoint specific problems with the text.
4. The Pennsylvania State University
Intelligent Tutoring Using the Structure Strategy to Improve Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students.
Project focus: Address students' failure to identify main ideas from expository text, as well as give cohesive and complete accounts of what they read through a Web-based intelligent tutoring intervention for middle school students.
5. Carnegie Mellon University
Reader-Specific Lexical Practice for Improved Reading Comprehension.
Project focus: Using recent improvements in computer science, develop a search engine tailored for selecting text passages that meet very detailed student information needs, including topic, difficulty level and desired vocabulary patterns.
6. Northern Illinois University
Improving students' comprehension and construction of arguments.
Project focus: Develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an instructional program for teaching high school and college students to better comprehend, evaluate and produce written arguments using a Web-based tutoring system.
7. University of California, Los Angeles
Introducing desirable difficulties for educational applications in science.
Project focus: Determine whether interventions that slow the rate of learning and appear to enhance long-term information retention can generalize to other contexts involving middle school and college students.
8. Columbia University
Study Enhancement Based on Principles of Cognitive Science.
Project focus: Improve academic performance by changing the way children approach studying by using a computer-based study program based on principles of cognitive science, and designed to target and improve memory and learning.
