Online reading comprehension to be studied

Three Penn State College of Education faculty members are participating in a new $3 million research project aimed at studying the effectiveness of an online reading comprehension program being used in middle schools.

The new project, titled "Efficacy and Replication Research on the Intelligent Tutoring System for the Structure Strategy—Rural and Suburban Schools Grades 4, 5, 7, and 8," examines the Web-based reading program known as Intelligent Tutoring for the Structure Strategy (ITSS), which was developed by a College of Education research team on an earlier grant that ends this summer.

"Schools are struggling with the task of improving reading among students," said Bonnie J. F. Meyer, professor of educational psychology. "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." Meyer is principal investigator for the grant that ends in August and co-principal investigator for the newly funded efficacy grant. Read more at gantdaily.com.