2 authors: Gina Biancarosa University of Oregon 49

Tools for Supporting Strategic Readers Innovative technology applications also show promise for supporting the development of advanced reading skills that students need to master discipline-specific knowledge areas and that may be particularly challenging for students from low socioeconomic back- grounds and non-English-speaking homes.
Self-paced tutorials have led to gains in
self-questioning, error detection, inference, summarization, and concept-mapping skills and strategies to enhance readers’ use of reading strategies and comprehension of texts. Two online interventions, Computer Assisted Strategy Teaching and Learning Environment and Improving Comprehension Online, have both shown positive effects in these skill areas in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth graders using Computer Assisted Strategy Teaching and Learning Environment outperform controls in applica- tion of the targeted strategies. Benefits can depend on genre, with treatment students outperforming on expository versus narrative texts or vice versa depending on the strategy under consideration.³² Monolingual and bilingual fifth-graders using Improving Comprehension Online have shown improve- ment relative to control students on norm- referenced and research-developed measures of vocabulary.³³ Students in grades six through twelve have largely endorsed online tutors and self-paced tutorials as desirable features of e-books.³⁴

Experimental evaluation of instructional agents—generally, animated avatars that respond to student input in digital text or human or computerized voices—has demon- strated particular benefit for boosting vocab- ulary, identifying inferences, developing metacognitive awareness regarding under- standing, and learning appropriate strate- gies.³⁵ The instructional agents respond with

clear, immediate, and individual corrective feedback that mimics teachers but on a scale that individual teachers cannot hope to replicate, thus improving a teacher’s ability to provide just-in-time individualized support to an entire class of diverse students. Moreover, these agents have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade, and some can now respond to spoken natural lan- guage.³⁶ Digital delivery of graphic organizers that provide readers with a structure for strategically interacting with the text has also been shown to improve comprehension.³⁷