May 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR

Print this article | Email this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

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.

CAST Inc.

Reading to learn: Investigating general and domain-specific supports in a technology-rich environment with diverse readers learning from informational text.
Principal investigator: Dr. Bridget Dalton
Online: www.cast.org/udl/index.cfm?i=4577
Students today must be able to comprehend complex text, including material presented in a multimedia Web-based format. This research team will 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. In addition, the researchers will determine how the genre of text being read (e.g., narrative vs. science), the way in which the text is presented (e.g., multimedia Website vs. digital text only), and how varying computer-based supports affect text comprehension by both struggling and average urban fourth-grade readers.

University of Colorado

Research on and with novel educational technologies for comprehension.
Principal investigator: Dr. Thomas Landauer
Online: http://cslr.colorado.edu
Learning to read and comprehend at a high level requires a large vocabulary. However, acquiring a large vocabulary requires extensive experience reading books filled with words the struggling reader d'es not know. For many students, breaking this vicious circle requires more practice than schools can provide. The investigators will develop a series of computer-managed instructional activities that will help students who have limited vocabularies acquire the substantially larger vocabularies necessary for high-level comprehension. They will evaluate the effects of these computer-based instructional activities on the enlargement of students' vocabularies in middle school, high school and college.

University of Memphis

Coh-metrix: Automated cohesion and coherence scores to predict text readability and facilitate comprehension.
Principal investigator: Dr. Danielle McNamara
Online: http://cohmetrix.memphis.edu/cohmetrixpr/index.html
The long-term goal of this research team is to improve reading comprehension in classrooms by providing tools to improve textbook writing and more appropriately match textbooks to the intended students. The current practice of determining the reading level of textbooks d'es not reflect scientific advances in understanding what makes written text understandable. This research team plans to develop two automated tools (Coh-Metrix and Coh-GIT) that will enable writers, editors and educators to more accurately estimate the appropriateness of a text for their audience, as well as to pinpoint specific problems with the text. Using these tools, the researchers will experimentally examine the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension with respect to reader aptitudes (e.g., prior knowledge, reading ability and motivation) in third- to fifth-grade students and college undergraduates.