SBIR Phase I: Technology for Individualized Pathways to Reading

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目将推进互动式阅读教学的最新发展，从根本上重新组织它，以满足个人学习者的需求和优势，并支持每个教师的课堂活动。几乎三分之二的美国四年级学生在阅读方面的得分低于熟练水平。鉴于早期阅读能力是所有学科学业成绩的主要预测因素，改善阅读教学将对许多人的生活和整个国家产生巨大的积极影响。该项目旨在以新的方式利用平板电脑平台的力量，为学习解码书面文字的过程带来新的灵活性和透明度。为实现这一目标，该项目将开发和评价一个能够进行适应性评估、教学和实践的多组件软件原型。该项目的研发旨在最终广泛使用产品，帮助每个孩子准备好满足课程的识字要求，并在科学等非小说阅读发挥越来越大作用的学科中创造公平的竞争环境。该项目的核心创新是一个新的，细粒度的方式建模每个孩子的阅读知识。这个模型代表了一个新的答案的问题，什么信息的语音教学系统需要保持，以提供最佳的个性化教学。该项目将开发跟踪学生个人理解拼写模式并在单词中识别它们的进展的方法，特别关注学生如何利用单词之间的相似性和差异。该项目将映射额外的单词特征，如熟悉度，复杂性，规律性，拼写的模糊性，以及与已知单词的相似性，这些单词会影响学生学习和掌握新单词的准备程度，从最初的参与到流利程度。额外的项目工作将开发和评估辅导决策的逻辑，研究将学习解码书面语言的过程游戏化的方法，并展示将软件使用与课堂平衡扫盲计划中的其他活动相结合的新方法。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will advance the state of the art in interactive reading instruction, fundamentally reorganizing it to respond to the needs and strengths of the individual learner, and to support the classroom activities of each teacher. Almost two thirds of U.S. 4th graders score below proficient in reading. Given that early reading ability is a major predictor of academic achievement across all subjects, improved reading instruction would have a tremendous positive impact on many lives and on the country as a whole. This project aims to harness the power of the tablet platform in new ways to bring new flexibility and transparency to the process of learning to decode the written word. To achieve this, the project will develop and evaluate a prototype of multi-component software capable of adaptive assessment, instruction and practice. The project's R&D is aimed toward the eventual widespread use of products that can help each child be ready to meet the literacy demands of the curriculum, and level the playing field in subjects such as science where nonfiction reading plays a growing role. The project's core innovation is a new, fine-grained way of modeling each child's reading knowledge. This model represents a new answer to the question of what information a phonics tutoring system needs to maintain in order to provide optimally individualized instruction. The project will develop ways of tracking the progressions by which individual students come to understand spelling patterns and recognize them in words, with particular attention to how students make use of similarities and differences between words. The project will map additional word characteristics such as familiarity, complexity, regularity, ambiguity of spelling, and resemblance to known words that influence a student's readiness to learn and master new words, from initial engagement up to fluency. Additional project work will develop and evaluate the logic of tutoring decisions, investigate ways to gamify the process of learning to decode written language, and demonstrate novel ways of integrating software use with other activities in a classroom's balanced literacy program.