Efficacy of the Web-Based Intelligent Tutoring System for the Structure Strategy With Fourth- and Fifth-Grade Students in High-Poverty Schools

• In Event: 75.020 - Social-Mediated Learning, Intelligent Tutoring, and Knowledge-Building Discourse

Abstract

Children attending high poverty schools frequently fail to succeed in school. A large scale randomized controlled trial was conducted to study the efficacy of a web-based intelligent tutoring system to deliver the structure strategy to improve content area reading comprehension. The studies conducted at 4th and 5th grade showed promising statistically significant effects on reading comprehension. In this manuscript we present findings from the study with a subset of high poverty schools. Results from our analyses show that 4th and 5th grade children in high poverty schools using ITSS statistically significantly outperformed their control counterparts with small effect sizes on researcher-designed measures. The effect size was .26 on the standardized Gray Silent Reading Test for fifth graders from high poverty schools.

Authors

• Kausalai K. Wijekumar, Texas A&M University - College Station

• Bonnie J. F. Meyer, The Pennsylvania State University

• Pui-Wa Lei, The Pennsylvania State University