Web-Based Intervention for Higher-Order Reading Skills

A promising metacognitive reading strategy intervention is being evaluated in several high schools as a means of improving students’ comprehension of science texts. Students are trained to use a variety of strategies in explaining texts to themselves when they do not understand a sentence or paragraph. To make the training more widely available, a web-based trainer has been developed. Transforming the training from humanto computer-based resulted in a highly interactive trainer that adapts its methods to the performance of the students. The iSTART trainer introduces the strategies in a classroom setting with interaction among three animated characters, a teacher and two student characters, and the human trainee. Then the trainee identifies the strategies in the explanations of a student character guided by a teacher character. Finally, the trainee practices explaining under the guidance of a teacher character. We describe this system and discuss how appropriate feedback is generated.