Reading comprehension deficits are pervasive for a disproportionate number of post-secondary students. These students have cognitive impairments that impact high level text processing skills and result in diverse reading profiles with difficulties in skills such as discerning between relevant and irrelevant information, drawing inferences, connecting background knowledge to new learning, and retaining and applying what was learned at a later date. Typically such deficits are managed by teaching the use of study-skills strategies. While there is strong face validity for these practices there is a lack of evidence-based practice, and virtually no information on candidacy or what types of deficits respond best to what types of strategies and supports. On the technology side, the popularity of electronic reading tablets offers a platform to deliver supports to improve reading comprehension and retention that could be adopted by college students. This project seeks to bridge the gap by developing the technology to support a diverse set of reading strategies in a highly adoptable form for college students with high-level reading impairments, by doing the science necessary to define a process that can assess each individual student, and by prescribing a set of strategies that eventually will be delivered in a hardware-software package. By using an iterative design process and a participatory action research model, this research will make the following contributions: a dynamic assessment process that matches reading profiles/impairments to strategy supports; a mapping of reading impairments to reading strategies; translation of reading strategies to delivery on electronic reading tablets; a demonstration that personalization and adaptation are possible using our software engineering models; and a dissemination package that uses open source software and hardware to deliver a research tool that could be used by companies designing commercialized reading tablets. To achieve these goals, the PI will partner with three institutions that have large populations of struggling readers in post-secondary educational settings: two VA facilities that support and train veterans returning to educational settings, and a student disability services program at a large urban state university. These groups have experience with the pervasive, high level reading challenges preventing educational success, and provide the natural contexts to evaluate the PI's models and shape the tools generated from this research. Pilot studies, laboratory experiments and longitudinal studies will be employed to develop and evaluate the technology for a dynamic reading assessment and support tool.
Broader Impacts: A growing population not able to meet the reading demands of college and community college courses is the large number of veterans returning form Iraq and Afghanistan seeking education and training benefits. It is estimated that 15-20% of these veterans have suffered mild brain injury sufficient to affect academic ability. Another large group of post-secondary students that is challenged by difficulties with reading comprehension are those with developmental conditions including adult attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and attention deficit disorder (ADD). Estimates regarding the number of students enrolled in colleges who report clinically significant ADHD or ADD symptoms vary between 2% to 8%; approximately 25% of students receiving disability support services are receiving those for ADHD. The PI expects two important outcomes from this work: the science missing from the literature that links reading impairments with reading strategies; and a demonstration tool, built on the science, that supports an assessment process and a delivery mechanism. With this latter outcome in mind, the PI intends to devote a large part of Year 5 of the project to making his tool highly attractive to companies who have the infrastructure to deliver products to the target populations.
