NCSeT Research Team at Michigan State University

The NCSeT Research Team at Michigan State University is comprised of the following individuals:

  • Dr. Cynthia Okolo, Principal Investigator and Research Site Director
  • Dr. Carol Sue Englert, Co-Principal Investigator
  • Dr. Summer Ferreri, Faculty Collaborator
  • Jinghong Tian, Research Assistant
  • Ira Socol, Graduate Research Assistant and Project Investigator

About NCSeT Research at Michigan State University

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. Continue reading “About NCSeT Research at Michigan State University”