At Michican State we are investigating the impact of various forms of electronically supported text with students with learning disabilities. We are working with 5th and 6th grade students in social studies and language arts classes. Texts in social studies and language arts often have similar text structures (e.g., narrative) but rely on different types of information (e.g., social studies text typically make more extensive use of pictures and other artifacts to support the narrative). Thus, we will be able to contrast how different aspects of text structure and textual information affect students’ use of supported text. In each of our studies, we use multielement designs to investigate differences in students’ text comprehension and engagement when they read text aloud versus when the text is read to them by a text-to-speech software program with different types of highlighting, vocabulary, and word recognition features.
National Center for the Supported Electronic Text
Michigan State University
In this project, we are investigating the impact of various forms of electronically supported text with students with learning disabilities. Over the course of the project, we are working with 5th and 6th grade students in social studies and language arts classes. Texts in social studies and language arts often have similar text structures (e.g., narrative) but rely on different types of information (e.g., social studies text typically make more extensive use of pictures and other artifacts to support the narrative). Thus, we will be able to contrast how different aspects of text structure and textual information affect students’ use of supported text. In each of our studies, we use multielement designs to investigate differences in students’ text comprehension and engagement when they read text aloud versus when the text is read to them by a text-to-speech software program with different types of highlighting, vocabulary, and word recognition features.
We began our work by attempting to identify the text-to-speech (TTS) tools we would use in our studies. We found that there are a plethora of tools that range in availability, sophistication, and cost, but we could find little advantage in the literature about which tools might be most effective for students with disabilities. We hypothesized that our research might make a bigger contribution to practice if we investigated TTS tools that are most often used by teachers, but again, we could find no guidance to help us determine which tools have been used, and with what types of outcomes.
Thus, we began our work by producing 4 papers: (a) a review of the ways in which digital texts can be used in the classroom and digital text options (Okolo, 2007a), (b) a review of ways in which video can supplement textbook-based learning in the classroom (Okolo, 2007b), (c) a review of available TTS tools, their features, and research about their impact on literacy and content-area learning (Tian & Okolo, 2007a), and (d) an analysis and comparison of features of available TTS tools (Tian & Okolo, 2007b). Two of these papers have been published in the Journal of Special Education Technology, and the other two are in the final stages of preparation for submission to Remedial and Special Education and the Journal of Special Education Technology.
The results of these reviews have shaped the design of our first two studies, which will commence in September, 2007. We will begin by comparing text read aloud by student with text read aloud by WYNN, a TTS tool that has many features in common with the other tools we have analyzed. We also will investigate student engagement as they engage in reading with and without TTS tools, as engagement is an important predictor of achievement, and has not been investigated in prior studies. The second study will compare the effect of WYNN; which is a commercial TTS tool with relatively sophisticated options, with a more widely-available and low-cost TTS tool that is freely available on the web (Fire Vox). The outcomes of Study One will dictate the specific parameters of Study Two.