Diagnosing Reading Deficiencies of Adults with Low Literacy Skills in an Intelligent Tutoring System

We developed a version of AutoTutor that helps struggling adult learners improve their comprehension strategies through conversational agents. We hypothesized that the accuracy and time to answer questions during the conversation could be diagnostic of their mastery of different reading comprehensio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGrantee Submission
Main Authors Shi, Genghu, Hampton, Andrew J, Chen, Su, Fang, Ying, Graesser, Arthur C
Format Report
LanguageEnglish
Published 01.06.2018
Subjects
Accuracy
Adult Learning
Adult Literacy
Educational Technology
Foreign Countries
Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Reaction Time
Reading Comprehension
Reading Difficulties
Reading Skills
Technology Uses in Education
Canada (Toronto)
Georgia (Atlanta)
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Summary:We developed a version of AutoTutor that helps struggling adult learners improve their comprehension strategies through conversational agents. We hypothesized that the accuracy and time to answer questions during the conversation could be diagnostic of their mastery of different reading comprehension components: words, textbase, situation model, and rhetorical structure. The results show that adults' performance on more basic reading components (i.e., meaning of words) was higher than on the deeper discourse levels. In contrast, time did not vary significantly among the theoretical levels. The results suggested that adults with low literacy had higher mastery on basic reading levels than deeper discourse levels. The tracking of performance on the four theoretical levels can provide a more nuanced diagnosis of reading problems than a single overall performance score and ultimately improve the adaptivity of an ITS like AutoTutor. [This paper was published in: R. Nkambou, R. Azevedo & J. Vassileva (Eds.), "Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems" (pp 463-465). Montreal, Cananda: Springer.]