Visit the College's News & Events Site or return to Connections

Penn State Receives DOE Grant to Study Tutoring Aimed at Middle School Reading
by Joe Savrock

University Park, Pa.—A team of researchers from Penn State University recently received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to further develop and investigate a program designed for middle school students to increase their reading comprehension skills. The project, titled “Intelligent Tutoring Using the Structure Strategy to Improve Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students,” will run for three years.

The aim of the project is to develop a computer program to serve as an “intelligent tutor” and is based in part on past tutoring interactions involving retired community participants who tutored fifth-grade students in the structure strategy on the Internet.

Bonnie Meyer

Bonnie J.F. Meyer, professor of educational psychology, is principal investigator of the project. “Schools are struggling with the task of improving reading among students,” she said. “Some students fail to succeed in tasks such as identifying main ideas from expository text and giving cohesive and complete accounts of what they read because of how they read, rather than because they do not read. We are seeking to address the national reading comprehension problem by creating a web-based intelligent tutoring system to help fifth- through seventh-grade students learn and use the structure strategy.”

Co-investigators are Kay Wijekumar, assistant professor of information sciences and technology; Wendy Middlemiss, assistant professor of human development; and Barbara Van Horn, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy and the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy.

Faculty associates for the project are Rayne A. Sperling and Pui-wa Lei, both assistant professors of educational psychology; and J. David Popp, affiliate assistant professor of education in the Learning and Performance Systems Department. Some former tutors are involved in the project, including Barbara Shockowitz, a recently retired State College teacher.

Meyer and colleagues recently published an earlier study with retired community tutors in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

###