Abstract
Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) is a Web-based application that provides young adolescent to college-age students with high-level reading strategy training to improve comprehension of science texts. iSTART is modeled after an effective, human-delivered intervention called self-explanation reading training (SERT), which trains readers to use active reading strategies to self-explain difficult texts more effectively. To make the training more widely available, the Web-based trainer has been developed. Transforming the training from a human-delivered application to a computer-based one has resulted in a highly interactive trainer that adapts its methods to the performance of the students. The iSTART trainer introduces the strategies in a simulated classroom setting with interaction between three animated characters—an instructor character and two student characters— and the human trainee. Thereafter, the trainee identifies the strategies in the explanations of a student character who is guided by an instructor character. Finally, the trainee practices self-explanation under the guidance of an instructor character. We describe this system and discuss how appropriate feedback is generated.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baker, L. (1996). Social influences on metacognitive development in reading. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.),Reading comprehension difficulties (pp. 331–352). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Baumann, J. F., Seifert-Kessell, N., &Jones, L. A. (1992). Effect of think-aloud instruction on elementary students’ comprehension monitoring abilities. Journal of Reading Behavior,24, 143–172.
Bereiter, C., &Bird, M. (1985). Use of thinking aloud in identification and teaching of reading comprehension strategies.Cognition & Instruction,2,131–156.
Best, R., Ozuru, Y., & McNamara, D. S. (in press). Self-explaining science texts: Strategies, knowledge and reading skill.Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences.
Bielaczyc, K., Pirolli, P. L., &Brown, A. L. (1995). Training in self-explanation and regulation strategies: Investigating the effects of knowledge acquisition activities on problem solving.Cognition & Instruction,13,221–252.
Bowen, B. A. (1999). Four puzzles in adult literacy: Reflections on the national adult literacy survey. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,42, 314–323.
Bransford, J., &Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding some investigations of comprehension and recall.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,11,717–726.
Brown, A. (1982). Learning how to learn from reading. In J. A. Langer & M. T. Smith-Burke (Eds.),Reader meets author: Bridging the gap (pp. 26–54). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Chi, M. T. H., Bassok, M., Lewis, M. W., Reimann, P., &Glaser, R. (1989). Self-explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems.Cognitive Science,13,145–182.
Chi, M. T. H., de Leeuw, N., Chiu, M., &LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding.Cognitive Science,18,439–477.
Cottrell, K., &McNamara, D. S. (2002). Cognitive precursors to science comprehension. In W. D. Gray & C. D. Schunn,Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 244–249). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cox, B. D. (1997). The rediscovery of the active learner in adaptive contexts: A developmental-historical analysis of transfer of training. Educational Psychologist,32, 41–55.
Craig, S., Gholson, B., Ventura, M., Graesser, A. C., &the Tutoring Research Group (2000). Overhearing dialogues and monologues in virtual tutoring sessions: Effects on questioning and vicarious learning. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education,11, 242–253.
Davey, B. (1983). Think aloud: Modeling the cognitive processes of reading comprehension. Journal of Reading,27, 44–47.
Dewitz, P., Carr, E., &Patberg, J. (1987). Effects of interference training on comprehension and comprehension monitoring. Reading Research Quarterly,22, 99–121.
Ericsson, K. A., &Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory.Psychological Review,102,211–245.
Foltz, P. W., Gilliam, S., &Kendall, S. A. (2000). Supporting content-based feedback in online writing evaluations with LSA.Interactive Learning Environments,8,111–129.
Garner, R. (1990). When children and adults do not use learning strategies: Toward a theory of settings. Review of Educational Psychology,60, 517–529.
Gernsbacher, M. A. (1990).Language comprehension as structure building. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gough, P. B., Hoover, W. A., &Peterson, C. L. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.),Reading comprehension difficulties: Process and intervention (pp. 1–13). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Graesser, A. C., Hu, X., & McNamara, D. S. (in press). Computerized learning environments that incorporate research in discourse psychology, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. In A. F. Healy (Ed.),Experimental cognitive psychology and its applications: Festschrift in honor of Lyle Bourne, Walter Kintsch, and Thomas Landauer. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Graesser, A. C., Jackson, G. T., Mathews, E. C., Mitchell, H. H., Olney, A., Ventura, M., Chipman, P., Franceschetti, D., Hu, X., Louwerse, M. M., Person, N. K., &the Tutoring Research Group (2003). Why/AutoTutor: A test of learning gains from a physics tutor with natural language dialog. In R. Alterman & D. Hirsh (Eds.),Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1–5). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Graesser, A. C., Wiemer-Hastings, K., Wiemer-Hastings, P., Kreuz, R., &the Tutoring Research Group (1999). AutoTutor: A simulation of a human tutor.Journal of Cognitive Systems Research,1,35–51.
Graesser, A. C., Wiemer-Hastings, P., Wiemer-Hastings, K., Harter, D., Person, N., &the Tutoring Research Group (2000). Using latent semantic analysis to evaluate the contributions of students in AutoTutor.Interactive Learning Environments,8,129–147.
Hansen, J., &Pearson, P. (1983). An instructional study: Improving the inferential comprehension of good and poor fourth-grade readers.Journal of Educational Psychology,75,821–829.
Just, M. A., &Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory.Psychological Review,99,122–149.
Kintsch, W. (1998).Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Knuth, D. (1998).The art of computer programming (2nd ed., Vol. 3). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Landauer, T. K., &Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge.Psychological Review,104,211–240.
Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., &Laham, D. (1998). Introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes,25, 259–284.
Long, D. L., Oppy, B. J., &Seely, M. R. (1994). Individual differences in the time course of inferential processing.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,20,1456–1470.
MacDonald, M. C., &Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996).Psychological Review,109,35–54.
Magliano, J. P., Dijkstra, K., &Zwaan, R. (1996). Generating predictive inferences while viewing a movie.Discourse Processes,22,199–224.
Magliano, J. P., &Millis, K. K. (2003). Assessing reading skill with a think-aloud procedure and latent semantic analysis. Cognition & Instruction,21, 251–283.
McKendree, J., Stenning, K., Mayes, T., Lee, J., &Cox, R. (1998). Why observing a dialogue may benefit learning.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning,14,110–119.
McNamara, D. S. (1997). Comprehension skill: A knowledge-based account. In M. G. Shafto & P. Langley (Eds.),Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 508–513). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
McNamara, D. S. (2001). Reading both high-coherence and low-coherence texts: Effects of text sequence and prior knowledge.Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,55,51 -62.
McNamara, D. S. (in press). SERT: Self-explanation reading training.Discourse Processes.
McNamara, D. S., Best, R., & Castellano, C. (2004). Learning from text: Facilitating and enhancing comprehension. Retrieved February 2004 fromwww.speechpathology.com.
McNamara, D. S., de Vega, M., & O’Reilly, T. (in press). Comprehension skill, inference making, and the role of knowledge. In F. Schmalhofer & C. A. Perfetti (Eds.),Higher level language processes in the brain: Inference and comprehension processes. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
McNamara, D. S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N., &Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good texts always better? Interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text.Cognition & Instruction,14,1–43.
McNamara, D. S., &Kintsch, W. (1996). Learning from texts: Effects of prior knowledge and text coherence.Discourse Processes,22,247–288.
McNamara, D. S., &McDaniel, M. (2004). Suppressing irrelevant information: Knowledge activation or inhibition?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,30,465–482.
McNamara, D. S., &Scott, J. L. (1999). Training reading strategies. In M. Hahn & S. C. Stoness (Eds.),Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 387–392). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
McNamara, D. S., &Scott, J. L. (2001). Working memory capacity and strategy use.Memory & Cognition,29,10–17.
McNamara, D. S., & the CSEP Lab (2004).Promoting active reading strategies to improve undergraduate students’ understanding of science. Annual project report submitted to the National Science Foundation IERI.
Millis, K., Kim, H.-J. J., Todaro, S., Magliano, J. P., Wiemer-Hastings, K., &McNamara, D. S. (2004). Identifying reading strategies using latent semantic analysis: Comparing semantic benchmarks.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,36,213–221.
Oakhill, J. (1984). Inferential and memory skills in children’s comprehension of stories.British Journal of Educational Psychology,54, 31–39.
Oakhill, J., &Yuill, N. (1996). Higher order factors in comprehension disability: Processes and remediation. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.),Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 69–92). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
O’Reilly, T., &McNamara, D. S. (2002). What’s a science student to do? In W. P. Gray & C. D. Shunn (Eds.),Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 726–731). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
O’Reilly, T., Sinclair, G. P., & McNamara, D. S. (in press). Reading strategy training: Automated versus live. InProceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Palinscar, A. S., &Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities.Cognition & Instruction,2, 117–175.
Paris, S., &Jacobs, J. (1984). The benefits of informed instruction for children’s reading awareness and comprehension skills.Child Development,55,2083–2093.
Pressley, M., &Ghatala, E. (1990). Self-regulated learning: Monitoring learning from text. Educational Psychologist,25, 19–33.
Pressley, M., Wood, E., Woloshyn, V., Martin, V., King, A., &Menke, D. (1992). Encouraging mindful use of prior knowledge: Attempting to construct explanatory answers facilitates learning. Educational Psychology,27, 91–109.
Rosen, V., &Engle, R. (1998). Working memory capacity and suppression.Journal of Memory & Language,39,418–436.
Shapiro, A. M., &McNamara, D. S. (2000). The use of latent semantic analysis as a tool for the quantitative assessment of understanding and knowledge.Journal of Educational Computing Research,22,1–36.
Shebilske, W., Jordan, J., Goettl, B., &Paulus, L. (1998). Observation versus hands-on practice of complex skills in dyadic, triadic, and tetradic training-teams.Human Factors,40,525–540.
Snow, C. [E.] (2002).Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Snow, C. E., Burns, M., &Griffin, P. (1998).Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Spilich, G., Vesonder, G., Chiesi, H., &Voss, J. (1979). Text processing of domain-related information for individuals with high and low domain knowledge.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,18,275–290.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978).Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Yuill, N., &Oakhill, J. (1988). Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders.British Journal of Psychology,79,173–186.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant REC-0089271 as a part of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McNamara, D.S., Levinstein, I.B. & Boonthum, C. iSTART: Interactive strategy training for active reading and thinking. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 36, 222–233 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195567
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195567