Scalable and Sustainable Technologies for Reading Instruction
Computer tools are now available that understand what students say and write. One system constructs a semantic space—a map that allows quick, efficient, and reasonably accurate computation of the similarity in meaning among words, sentences, and whole texts. This provides an objective measure of the similarity between the essays of two students, or between a student’s summary and the text summarized.
Teachers often ask students to summarize a chapter in a textbook—sometimes for practice in summary writing, sometimes to check whether the student has read and understood the text. But the teacher is not always able to give individualized feedback or supervise revisions. A tool called Summary Street can help with these tasks.
Typically, when adolescent students summarize a long text, they focus on one or two sections and neglect the others. Summary Street, by means of a user-friendly graphic interface, informs the student which sections have been adequately covered and which have not. The tool also informs students when a summary exceeds the allowed number of words and helps them recognize irrelevant or redundant sentences. Students can work on their writing as long as they want, or until feedback tells them they have adequately covered every aspect of the text within any length limits set by the teacher.
Summary Street never tells students what to do, but instead points out problems and suggests solutions. The student must make the decisions, with the understanding that the computer provides useful, but fallible, advice.
The presenter describes Summary Street and presents two classroom studies of its efficacy. These studies indicate that middle school students write better summaries when using the tool. They also show that sumamry-writing skills transferred to an objective test, even when the tool was no longer available.
Walter Kintsch is a professor and director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. (more about the presenter)
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Suggested citation: Kintsch, W. (2005, April 30). Scalable and sustainable technologies for reading instruction. Paper presented at the International Reading Association Reading Research 2005 conference, San Antonio, Texas.
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