1. What are the effects of text-to-speech on students' time on task and academic achievement when reading and learning in an online curriculum?
2. What are the effects of guided notes on students' time on task and academic achievement when reading and learning in an online curriculum?
3. Is there a difference in effect between text-to-speech and guided notes?
4. Do students have a preference for text-to-speech or guided notes?

Update for 2009

Participants in the 2008-2009 study were six high school students with disabilities enrolled in resource-room English/Language Arts classes, where the teachers were using the EnvisionIT curriculum as part of their regular course of study. Based on an AIMSweb reading comprehension assessment, all but one of the students' reading level were between 2nd to 4th grade, with the last student at the kindergarten level. Text-to-speech was made available to participating students using a flash drive containing ClickSpeak. "Guided Notes" are instructor-prepared handouts that provide all students with background information and standard cues with specific spaces to write key facts, concepts, and /or relationships as teachers lecture or students review online content (Heward, 2007). When applied to eText, guided notes are a notational support to enable the student to attend to essential content by guiding them in the recording of key facts, concepts and relationships among concepts. Once completed, guided notes are used for purposes of studying or completing assignments. The notes are verbatim replications of the content with key words, phrases, and concepts left blank for the student to complete as they read the content on the computer screen.

A modified reversal design was used to examine the following research question: what effects do GN vs. ClickSpeak have on academic achievement and on-task behavior? During baseline, the "A" phase, data were collected from units when students were not provided intervention (i.e., ClickSpeak or GN). Reversals B and C denote students' use of either GN or ClickSpeak as the intervention, respectively. The final reversal of "D" refers to the intervention that demonstrated to be more effective for a student as determined by the quiz scores from previous units. Three students were assigned to ABCBCD sequence and the remaining three students were assigned to ACBCBD design. With respect to academic performances the results suggest that the Guided Notes intervention was more effective than the ClickSpeak intervention in terms of gain scores on content related tests. The results also suggest the students vary as to which intervention was more helpful to them with respect to staying on task.