The Strategic Reader: Textbooks Today, Web Tomorrow

Completed in 2000

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Public secondary schools in the United States are failing to meet the educational needs of a large segment of the student population, including those of an estimated 5.5 million students with learning disabilities. Inadequate reading instruction is a particular problem, since reading is a requirement for success in all content areas and on high stakes assessments. Unfortunately, current textbook materials and teaching approaches fail to provide the supports necessary to effectively foster text-based learning for all students.

Recognizing the critical need to reform this system, CAST embarked on a two-year, federally funded research and development project entitled Strategic Reader: Textbooks Today, Web Tomorrow. Completed in 2000, the project investigated the potential of a multimedia, technology-based instructional approach for improving reading skills and textbook learning for all students, including those with disabilities.

Project Goals

The project's specific goals were to:

1. Develop "Strategic Reader," a refinement of the commercially available software tool, CAST eReader^TM, paired with an electronic version of a history textbook. In addition to eReader's supports for decoding and entry-level reading skills, Strategic Reader would enable the embedding of universally designed scaffolds for higher-level comprehension and study skills within electronic texts.
2. Develop instructional approaches that use the flexibility of digital technology to optimize learning opportunities for all students within the general education curriculum.
3. Establish publisher guidelines for the preparation of digital textbooks that improve access and learning for all students within the general education curriculum.

Approach

Led by Principal Investigator Bart Pisha, researchers began by developing a digital prototype of the popular, printed history textbook, The American Nation, which would incorporate a range of powerful built-in supports and customizable features. With the help of teachers and students from Wakefield High School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, the researchers evaluated and refined the Strategic Reader prototype over the course of the first year. Seventy 11^th-grade students at the high school, including 16 students with identified learning disabilities and one student with a significant visual impairment, worked with the prototype and provided feedback that was used to progressively improve it. In the second year, a similar approach was used to develop, test, and refine assignments and instructional procedures for using the Strategic Reader.

Project Outcomes

The Strategic Reader project yielded a useful and innovative software tool for improving diverse students' textbook learning and reading skills as well as vital information about how to implement the tool and design future textbooks:

1. Development of Strategic Reader: The qualitative data collected in this study suggest that the technology tool and associated instructional approach can surpass the ability of print materials to meet the learning needs of highly diverse students. Built-in scaffolds and supports such as text-to-speech, hyperlinks to reference materials and supplementary information, and a notepad tool for recording observations appear to increase students' engagement in learning, contributing to higher quality student work.
2. Contributions to Universal Design for Learning (UDL): The Strategic Reader project contributes to UDL by providing a model for the development of a scaffolded instructional approach that offers access to not only content but learning as well. The Strategic Reader was designed to support the three broad networks of the learning brain--scaffolding students' varied recognition, strategic, and affective needs.
3. Guidelines for implementation of Strategic Reader: The project results aided in developing a description of the types of training and support necessary for the transition from a print-based approach to the technology-based approach developed in the Strategic Reader project. Although many traditional assignments may be inappropriate for learning with a digital textbook, teaching methods can be rethought and restructured so that they better promote learning in an online environment.
4. Publisher recommendations: By identifying which supports are most effective, the Strategic Reader project resulted in preliminary recommendations for the design of accessible, flexible, digitally based curriculum materials. When further developed, these recommendations can serve as an important guide for publisher practice.

Future Directions

The project's preliminary recommendations provide a basis for further research and development and the beginning of more generalized guidelines for the design of supportive electronic learning environments. Such efforts are greatly needed in the current climate, in which several states with statewide textbook adoption policies require or are contemplating requiring textbook publishers to provide digital versions of their materials.

Overall, the results of this project indicate the potential of UDL to help diverse students be more productive learners--potential that warrants further investigation.

Funding

Funding for The Strategic Reader: Textbooks Today,Web Tomorrow Project was provided by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in the U.S. Department of Education, Award No.H327A980024. Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. Department of Education.