This research program is designed to motivate, create and evaluate a new theory and methodology of learning, in which computer analysis of writing and speech is used to teach students to process and comprehend information more effectively. This work will inform educators on instructional and assessment strategies for improved reading comprehension to a degree not yet present in schools today. The methodology will teach students to read more effectively and to comprehend and learn more from what they read. Since the methodology can be applied to any text, it can be incorporated into reading programs to improve reading achievement, and be used as an effective tool to improve achievement in science and mathematics.
The work is intended to achieve both theoretical and research breakthroughs in four areas: (1) extend LSA to incorporate syntactic as well as semantic information; (2) extend the power and scope of LSA by advancing its conceptual and mathematical framework to include other psychological process models that handle phenomena such as metaphor and causal inferences; and (3) extend LSA to process transcriptions of natural continuous speech, enabling LSA to be used to teach comprehension of both read and spoken text by children who cannot write or type well enough to produce textual responses; and (4) demonstrate that these theoretical advances improve comprehension of speech and text by students in different grades, ethic backgrounds, and in different subjects.
