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Struggling Adult Readers Spend More Time Choosing to Learn, but Achieve Comprehension Strategy Learning Comparable to Normal Readers

Breya Walker, Raven Davis, Whitney Baer, and Arthur GraesserThe University of Memphis

INTRODUCTION

FUNDING

CONCLUSIONS

METHODS DISCUSSION

Procedure• Self-select questions on a board

• Questions were categorized as Easy (i.e., 100 and 200 points) and

Hard (i.e., 300 and 400 points)

• Materials cover: Key information, evaluating narrative and persuasive

text, building bridges, bridging narrative text, and evaluating

understanding

• Goal: User answers self-selected question correctly to reach 2500

points

Research reported in this project was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) under award number [R305C120001]

Time Per QuestionSR- Easy 2.4 minutes Hard 2.9 minutesCS- Easy: 1.1 minutes Hard: 1.4 minutes

•No significant difference between question selection

and group

•No significant difference between total score obtained

by SR compared to CS

•There was a significant difference in the amount of

time it took to complete the review module with SR

spending more time interacting with AutoTutor and

answering question regardless of question type compared

to CS

•Therefore, based upon previous research, these

results support the notion that struggling readers may

have acquired several reading comprehension strategies

necessary to perform at a comparable level to that of

normal readers.

Analysis Variables: • Completion time (Total time, Easy Time/Hard Time), Total score (sum of 1st

attempts only), Question selection (Easy vs. Hard number of questions

selected by group).

RESULTS

100 point question 300 point question

**

*

College Students: n = 34

(M = 23.35 age, SD = 6.98)Struggling Adults: n = 45

(M = 43.8 age, SD = 14.6)

The Center for the Study of Adult Literacy (CSAL) has created an Auto Tutor

Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that teaches multifaceted higher- and lower-level

reading comprehension strategies and promotes reading competency supported by

previous research (Lovett et al., 2000). The current investigation sought to examine

the performance of Struggling Readers (SR) and College Students (CS) on multiple

reading comprehension strategies implemented into a review module. We

hypothesized that SR would spend more time interacting with the module compared

to CS, SR would opt to self-select easier items given their reading ability, and SR

performance would be different compared to CS.

• Contrary to predicted outcomes, results show that

struggling readers and college students did not differ in

the type of questions selected during the review lesson.

• Struggling readers performed just as well as college

student during the first attempts of the question selection

process with no significant differences seen in Total

Score by group. First attempt scores were analyzed only

because first attempts would provide a true reflection of

performance prior to lesson completion.

Lesson Completion TimeSR:13.2 minutesCS:8.8 minutes