In this paper, we present iSTART-Early, an intelligent tutoring system that provides automated instruction and practice on higher-order reading comprehension strategies to 3rd and 4th grade students. iSTART-Early provides personalized, interactive, game-based strategy instruction and practice on comprehension strategies (i.e., Ask It, Reword It,…

Speech technology (automated speech recognition -- ASR and text-to-speech) offers great promise in the field of automated literacy and reading tutors for children. Students in third and fourth grades struggle with generating longer strings of text on a QWERTY keyboard because they still "hunt and peck" for AQ1 the letters and symbols…

The Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) brings significant changes as well as opportunities for schools to improve their students' academic outcomes. One proposed regulation is for states to analyze the performance of student subgroups separately in order to show how states are levelling the playing field over time to ensure educational equity. This…

A study investigated the development of metacognitive strategy instruction on standardized reading comprehension measures with fourth grade students. Forty-one subjects were assigned to one of three criterion reading groups, based on pretest scores using the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test (SDRT) and the Wide Range Achievement Test: (1)…

A study examined whether good and poor readers benefit differentially from intervention in mnemonic strategy use. Subjects, 72 fourth grade males from a suburban public school in the southeast, were randomly assigned to either a training, induction or control group. Training subjects received explicit demonstration of appropriate strategies, while…

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…

A study examined the nature and extent of the instruction, application, and practice in deriving word meanings from context in a variety of basal reading series. Seven major basal reading series at the fourth-grade level (published between 1986 and 1989 and readily available) were analyzed. Results indicated that: (1) the series differed…

The usefulness of before-adjunct questions with standardized multiple-choice tests in increasing reading comprehension scores was studied by examining the relative effectiveness of reading test questions first or reading the passage first. Subjects were 210 fourth graders randomly assigned to two treatment groups. The Level 9 Reading Comprehension…

A study investigated the effectiveness of strategies designed to improve reading comprehension, in order to (1) determine the effectiveness of the Cloze Story Map (CSM), a cloze-mapping strategy, on improving the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students using expository text and different sorts of deletion procedures; (2) investigate the…

A study examined the effectiveness of a training program in deriving word meanings through morphological analysis and from context. Subjects were 31 fourth-grade average and poor readers from 8 Dutch elementary schools. Four groups of students were assigned to the experimental group and four groups were assigned to the control group. The…

Emergent reading levels are those levels a pupil can sustain under direct guidance or with mediation and support by the teacher. A major implication of the emergent reading level construct is that strategies for reading placement would need to be revised. A study was conducted to ascertain whether the emergent reading level concept is valid and…

A study investigated whether a student's repertoire of comprehension-fostering tactics could be reliably identified, with the expectation that this sort of diagnostic profile might serve as a basis for an individualized remedial program. Subjects, 81 second, third, fourth, and fifth grade students enrolled in remedial reading programs in six…

A study investigated the use of the semantic webbing technique to improve reading comprehension. The model of a web consists of the core question, the web strands, the supports of the strand, and the strand ties. Subjects, 25 third graders and 26 fourth graders, were assigned to reading ability groups based on past performance, informal testing…

A study examined the effects of prediction training on the reading comprehension and written composition performance of fourth-grade students on the following reading and writing tasks: story recall, story generation, and number of relevant predictions. Subjects, 40 students attending two private urban elementary schools, were assigned to one of…

To investigate the higher level comprehension strategies used by children reading basal reader stories, a study compared the results of an earlier investigation of 50 fourth grade level readers' comprehension strategies with findings gained from 30 subjects using a sixth grade basal reader. Subjects were asked to read aloud from a basal and stop…