Abstract
There is little empirical research available on the substantial problem of adult low literacy rates, and limited educational technologies are available to address distinct instructional needs of this population. This paper reports on development and testing of a version of Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) for Adult Literacy Learners (iSTART-ALL) We describe modifications of iSTART to accommodate adult literacy learners, including new practice modules (i.e., summarization, question asking), a new library of texts, and an interactive narrative for adult literacy learners to engage in extended practice of reading comprehension strategies. We report results of a study examining reactions to iSTART-ALL and performance data while engaging with the interactive narrative. The attitudinal study, conducted with 38 adult literacy learners, demonstrated generally positive reactions to the narrative. Results also revealed that task performance was strongly related to individual difference scores on reading comprehension assessments, and more so with higher-level comprehension skills than basic word-level skills, providing concurrent validity for the interactive narrative tasks.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to recognize support of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A130124, and the Office of Naval Research, through Grants N00014140343 and N00014172300, to Arizona State University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, or the Office of Naval Research.
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Johnson, A.M., Guerrero, T.A., Tighe, E.L., McNamara, D.S. (2017). iSTART-ALL: Confronting Adult Low Literacy with Intelligent Tutoring for Reading Comprehension. In: André, E., Baker, R., Hu, X., Rodrigo, M., du Boulay, B. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61425-0_11
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