Current information about this program can be found under the Education Research program.

CAST, Inc.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Bridget Dalton
Reading to learn: Investigating general and domain specific supports in a technology-rich environment with diverse readers learning from informational text

This research team will develop a computer-based instructional approach that will support struggling readers and will accelerate their development of reading comprehension, especially for informational text. In addition, the researchers will determine how the genre of text being read (narrative vs. science), the way in which the text is presented (multi-media website vs. digital text only), and how varying computer-based supports affect text comprehension by both struggling and average urban fourth-grade readers.

Eugene Research Institute
Principal Investigator: Dr. Scott Baker
The Story Read Aloud Project: The development of an innovative instructional approach to promote comprehension and vocabulary in first grade classrooms

In this project, a read-aloud intervention designed to enhance first-grade children's vocabulary, use of comprehension strategies, and complex thinking about text will be designed, implemented, and evaluated.

Ohio State University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ian Wilkinson
Group discussions as a mechanism for promoting high-level comprehension of text

The goal of this project is to identify which types of communication enhance understanding during discussion and validate empirically the use of group discussion as a means to enhance high-level comprehension in 4th and 6th grade students.

University of Colorado
Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Landauer
Research on and with novel educational technologies for comprehension

The investigators will develop a series of computer-managed instructional activities that will help students who enter the learning environment with small vocabularies acquire the substantially larger vocabularies necessary for high-level comprehension. They will evaluate the effects of these computer-based instructional activities on the enlargement of students' vocabularies in middle school, high school, and college students.

University of Memphis
Principal Investigator: Dr. Danielle McNamara
Coh-metrix: Automated cohesion and coherence scores to predict text readability and facilitate comprehension

This research team plans to develop two automated tools (Coh-Metrix and Coh-GIT) that will enable writers, editors, and educators to more accurately estimate the appropriateness of a text for their audience, and to pinpoint specific problems with the text. Using these tools, the researchers will experimentally examine the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension with respect to reader aptitudes (e.g., prior knowledge, reading ability, and motivation) in 3rd to 5th grade students and college undergraduates.

University of Pittsburgh
Principal Investigator: Dr. Charles Perfetti
Word learning and comprehension: New laboratory approaches and classroom studies

The researchers will evaluate the impact of direct vocabulary instruction on word knowledge and reading comprehension in the laboratory with college students and in classrooms with kindergarten and first grade students.