digital reading materials for poor readers? it depends james jackson [email protected] cindy okolo...
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Reading Materials for Poor Readers? It
Depends
James [email protected]
Cindy [email protected]
It’s no secret: Many of America’s students
have literacy difficulties
Students with disabilities, as a group,
have lowest literacy scores on NAEP
Textbooks remain the primary instructional tool in general education classrooms
• Especially at middle school and high school levels
• (Kamil, 2010)
You can’t learn much from books you can’t read (Allington, 2010)
We know the problem: What’s the solution?
“In your plan, consider how you will adapt the lesson for a student
who can’t read the textbook”
• Undergraduate special education major: “I will let the student listen to the book on his iPhone.”
• Undergraduate special education major: “I will have the student read the textbook on the computer with text to speech.”
• Masters special education major: “The student has a reading disability, so she can access the book through her Bookshare account on her IPad.”
Problem Solved
After all, students with print disabilities are eligible for digital
reading materials as a component of accessible educational
materials (AEM)
And, there are many sources of digital reading materials
• Accessible Materials Providers (such as Bookshare)• Free and commercial• Trade books and textbooks• Computers, mobile devices, all with
text to speech• Operate within many different
operating systems & software programs
But access doesn’t mean students are better
readers
Or that they learn more from text
In and of themselves, digital reading materials
are not the solution to the problems that poor
readers have in learning from text
Digital Text in Context
Barriers to Access
• Not all text starts out digital• To make sure I had timely access, I often had
to scan books/articles myself.• Even documents I received digitally often had
to be remediated
• I am highly technically skilled, and I have access to tools to do remediation• Even so it took a lot of trial and error and work
on my part to make digital text a possibility for me.
Digital Text in K-12
• How easy is it to use?• Perceptions of usefulness and ease-of-use
predict actual use (Chuttur, 2009).
• What is the quality of the digital text?• How consistent is markup across sources?• Does the functionality supported by different
sources meet user needs?
Digital Text in K-12
• How portable are these systems?• Do students have access in the classroom, or
only the computer lab?• Do students have access at home?• Does student process/annotations follow them
across devices and platforms?