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University of Georgia 2009 Update
Research Team

John Langone, Kevin Ayres, and Karen Douglas

Overview of Strand Focus

Supported eText Research with Students who have Cognitive Disabilities. This strand of research investigates the use of supported etext for students with cognitive disabilities. Over the past three years, four studies have been implemented to investigate the effects of presentational, navigational, translational, and illustrative resources on the reading comprehension of students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. Research questions in these studies addressed the following:
  1. 1. Will electronic text supported with video illustrations improve comprehension for students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities?
  2. 2. What are the effects of highlighting digital text read out loud on the # of words read correctly and quality of story retells?
  3. 3. What are the differential effects of audio supports, photographic supports, and video supports when compared to digital text alone?
  4. 4. What are the effects of repeated readings with audio support on story retell?

Update for 2009

Currently, we are studying the effectiveness of pictorial graphic organizers for improving the comprehension of electronic text news articles by students with significant cognitive disabilities. Students are being presented with adapted news articles in PowerPoint with electronic text supports including audio and graphics above key words (see Figure 1). The students are also being taught how to develop and use a graphic organizer to aid in answering questions about the article immediately after hearing it read and the following day. We are using an alternating treatments research design across three conditions. The first condition is not having a graphic organizer to help answer questions. The second condition is using a graphic organizer to answer questions on the day the news article is read and the next day. The third condition is using a graphic organizer after the article is read but not using it the next day. We hope to find that the graphic organizer provides a visual aid to help.

 

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Figure 1. Screenshot from an adapted news article presented in PowerPoint.

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