Individual Differences in Learning Potential for Language and Literacy

语言和识字学习潜力的个体差异

• 批准号: 8505683
• 负责人: David Braze
• 金额: $ 74.56万
• 依托单位: HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-04-01 至 2017-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8505683
• 关键词: Address; Adult; Age; American; Behavioral Research; Characteristics; Child; Cognitive; Communities; Complex; Comprehension; Computer Simulation; Development; Dimensions; Drops; Economics; Education; Educational process of instructing; Environment; Exhibits; Failure; Foundations; Growth; Incidence; Individual; Individual Differences; Institutes; Instruction; Intervention; Laboratories; Language; Learning; Letters; Linguistics; Maps; Measures; Mental Health; Nature; Neurocognitive; Occupational; Orthography; Outcome; Outcome Study; Performance; Persons; Policies; Population; Population Study; Poverty; Prevalence; Primary Schools; Printing; Procedures; Process; Public Health; Reader; Reading; Reading Disabilities; Remedial Teaching; Research; Risk; Sampling; Secondary Schools; Semantics; Speech; Staging; Structure; Students; System; Test Result; Testing; Variant; Vocabulary; Workplace; Writing; base; community college; design; effective intervention; experience; improved; indexing; information organization; innovation; knowledge base; lexical; literacy; novel; offspring; phonology; physical conditioning; programs; public health relevance; remediation; research study; skills; sound; spelling; success; syntax; theories; university student; young adult

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The unacceptably high incidence of poor literacy skills among American young people is a public health crisis that is both insufficiently understood and understudied. Low reading skill in adults is consistently associated with many negative outcomes, including lesser economic success, increased risk of poor mental and physical health, and poor outcomes for offspring (Kutner, et al., 2007; National Institute for Literacy, 2008). There is a growing appreciation that we urgently need to identify the learning mechanisms for those skills that underlie reading comprehension, and to better understand how they fail in low literacy individuals. Our focus is on young adults, but not the predominantly middle class university students who are most often the subjects of reading research in this age range, but a far less restrictive community-based sample obtained from adult education programs, community colleges, organizations that serve young people and from the community at large. Thus, our sample encompasses a wide range of skill levels including many who have or are at risk of dropping out of the educational system after experiencing repeated learning failure. To date there has been remarkably little direct study of learning processes pertaining to literacy skills and the cognitive abilities that make reading comprehension possible. Clarifying the connections between learning capacities and literacy skills is essential for gauging potential for remediation. This project will build on research from our own group and elsewhere showing that poor readers exhibit reliable differences in learning of linguistic and orthographic structure An important innovation of the project is its use of experimental learning tasks to determine connections among capacities for learning in several theoretically important domains of linguistic and orthographic structure. These tasks include probes of (a) learning relationships between sounds of words and word meanings; (b) learning relationships between spellings and word meanings; and critically; (c) learning relationships between sounds and letters; (d) learning for improved efficiency in processing complex syntactic and semantic structures typical of written language. Individual learning profiles derived from the proposed experiments will be related to scores from a comprehensive test battery indexing capacities that are known to differentiate better from less skilled readers within our study population. This will allow us to connect to the existing knowledge base on individual differences in reading comprehension. A second key innovation of the project is to target a large understudied population that is socially and economically important. Whereas most past studies of individual differences in literacy focus on children at early stages of acquisition, our project focuses on older individuals who are products of our primary and secondary schools but who are in many cases unprepared for further education or the demands of the workplace. The prevalence of poor readers in our samples allows us to study the outcomes of atypical developmental trajectories, providing important constraints on current theory. Our research will elucidate mechanisms for the promotion of effective reading skill within this segment of the population. Thus, through improved understanding learner subtypes, this research speaks to the issue of creating more effective learning environments for low-literacy secondary and post-secondary students.

描述（由申请人提供）：美国年轻人识字能力差的发生率高得令人无法接受，这是一场公共卫生危机，既没有得到充分理解，也没有得到充分研究。成年人的低阅读技能始终与许多负面结果相关，包括较少的经济成功，精神和身体健康不良的风险增加，以及后代的不良结果（Kutner等人，国家扫盲研究所，2008年）。越来越多的人认识到，我们迫切需要确定这些技能的学习机制，这些技能是阅读理解的基础，并更好地了解他们是如何在低识字率的人中失败的。我们的重点是年轻的成年人，但不是主要的中产阶级大学生谁是最经常的阅读研究的主题在这个年龄段，但限制少得多的社区为基础的样本从成人教育计划，社区学院，为年轻人服务的组织和整个社区。因此，我们的样本涵盖了广泛的技能水平，包括许多在经历多次学习失败后已经或有可能辍学的人。到目前为止，对与识字技能和使阅读理解成为可能的认知能力有关的学习过程的直接研究非常少。澄清学习能力和识字技能之间的联系对于衡量补救潜力至关重要。这个项目将建立在我们自己的小组和其他地方的研究表明，穷人的读者表现出可靠的差异，在学习的语言和正字法结构的一个重要的创新项目是它的实验学习任务，以确定在几个理论上重要的语言和正字法结构域的学习能力之间的连接。这些任务包括探索（a）学习单词的发音和词义之间的关系;（B）学习拼写和词义之间的关系;（c）学习发音和字母之间的关系;（d）学习提高处理书面语言典型的复杂句法和语义结构的效率。从拟议的实验中得出的个人学习概况将与综合测试组合索引能力的分数相关，这些能力已知可以更好地区分我们研究人群中技能较低的读者。这将使我们能够连接到现有的知识基础上的个体差异，阅读理解。该项目的第二个关键创新是针对大量未得到充分研究的人口，这些人口在社会和经济上具有重要意义。过去大多数关于识字能力个体差异的研究都集中在儿童的早期习得阶段，而我们的项目则集中在年龄较大的人身上，他们是我们小学和中学的产物，但在许多情况下，他们没有为进一步的教育或工作场所的需求做好准备。在我们的样本中，阅读能力差的人普遍存在，这使我们能够研究非典型发展轨迹的结果，为当前的理论提供了重要的限制。我们的研究将阐明在这部分人群中促进有效阅读技能的机制。因此，通过更好地了解学习者亚型，这项研究谈到了为低识字率的中学和中学后学生创造更有效的学习环境的问题。