REMEDIAL WRITING SOFTWARE FOR THE LEARNING DISABLED

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The overall goal of this effort is to develop an effective software tool for remediating the types of writing problems specific to the learning disabled population. The Phase I research will focus on the modification of WRITE and PROOF, a word processing program with the capability of checking spelling and grammar in real-time on Apple // computers. This software, which was developed by the proposing organization for use with "normal" junior high school students and English as a Second Language students, can be tailored to provide assistance to the user based on an analysis of commom error patterns. Specific tasks for Phase I include the collection and linguistic analysis of 100 writing samples from learning disabled students in the 4th - 12th grades, modification of spelling-and grammar-help algorithms to assist this population group with selected problems, and classroom trials of the software. In Phase II we will add speech synthesis capabilities to the software to provide an alternative means of feedback to the student. In addition, Phase II will expand the software to a broader range of syntactic ad semantic problems, and provide automatic scoring and record- keeping. These changes will be supplemented with a controlled study to evaluate the effficacy of WRITE and PROOF in improving the writing skills of the learning disabled. This proposal offers an opportunity to apply a unique technology for real-time natural language parsing to the needs of the learning disabled; such technologies are usually reserved for "high-end" users, not students.