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Scalable and Sustainable Technologies for Reading Instruction An Interagency Education Research Initiative: NSF - IES - NIH Principal Investigators: Walter Kintsch, Donna Caccamise, Ron Cole, Lynn Snyder, & Richard Olson Slide 2 The Push to Improve Literacy Every child can learn to read, yet Literacy is a national problem We have good basic research, problem is To develop practical implementations To get them used widely in schools IERI initiative Slide 3 Colorado Literacy Tutor Tools for Teachers K-6th grade: emphasis on foundational reading skills: Interactive books for practice plus tutors for special problems 6th-14th grade: emphasis on comprehension and learning from text Slide 4 Underlying Cognitive Science Research Tutoring is an effective method of instruction: Human tutors produce gains between.4 and 2.3 standard deviations over classroom teaching Most human tutors have only modest domain knowledge and rarely use sophisticated tutoring strategies Existing Artificial Intelligence tutors such as AUTOTUTOR (Graesser et a., 1999) and ATLAS (van Lehn et al., 2000) approach the effectiveness of human tutors (Graesser et al., 2001) Slide 5 Underlying Cognitive Science Research Creating the Next Generation of Intelligent Animated Conversational Agents: Use of synthesized speech and speech recognition Conversation with a talking head Learners respond in English in addition to click-and-point Slide 6 Underlying Cognitive Science Research Latent Semantic Analysis: Theory, Technology and Practice LSA as a map of meaning High-dimensional semantic space Text meaning as the sum of the words Limitations: Learns only from words Neglect of order and syntax Slide 7 A map is a 2-dimensional representation of distance and direction data: Data:Map: Slide 8 A semantic space is a k-dimensional representation of word co-occurrence data (k