New challenges in today's world have contributed to increased attention toward evaluating individuals' collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills. One difficulty with this work is identifying evidence of individuals' CPS capabilities, particularly when interacting in digital spaces. Often human-driven approaches are used but are limited in scale.…

The purpose of this study was to understand the impact, implementation and costs associated with a one-semester elective lab course in 9th grade, Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents (ALFA) Lab, which seeks to improve students' reading achievement, particularly for those from economically disadvantaged communities. This study used three cohorts…

This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The objective of this report is to explore how ninth grade data can predict the graduation outcomes of newcomers. Based upon predictor variables, binary indicators can identify students…

This study examined the effects of Reading Intervention for Adolescents, a 2-year extensive reading intervention targeting current and former English learners identified as struggling readers based on their performance on the state accountability assessment. Students who enrolled at three participating urban high schools were randomly assigned to…

We report results of two studies examining the relation between decoding and reading comprehension. Based on our analysis of prominent reading theories such as the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) and the Self-teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995), we propose the Decoding…

Little is known about how specific components of working memory, namely, attentional processes including response inhibition, sustained attention, and cognitive inhibition, are related to reading decoding and comprehension. The current study evaluated the relations of reading comprehension, decoding, working memory, and attentional control in…

Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…