Reading Tutor Research Articles

Participation rates, characteristics, and differential effects on reading literacy of extracurricular tutoring in a German large-scale assessment

Because large-scale studies repeatedly indicated low reading literacy for many students, a need for interventions fostering reading literacy, such as extracurricular tutoring, has often been emphasized. Several reading promoting programs, suitable for extracurricular tutoring, were developed and shown to be effective in recent years. Moreover, these studies and analyses of extracurricular activities and tutoring yielded findings on learning-supporting characteristics and effects on students’ achievement of such extracurricular offers. Nevertheless, little is known to date about the implementation of extracurricular tutoring in practice in Germany, particularly about its participation rates, characteristics, and effects on students` reading literacy. Thus, the present study investigated participation rates of extracurricular tutoring in reading and in German among students in general and among various subgroups between Grades 5 and 7. Furthermore, the study examined general and subject-specific characteristics and effects of extracurricular tutoring on reading literacy. The analyses used a sample of students (N = 5113) of the National Educational Panel Study in Germany. In addition to descriptive analyses of characteristics and participation rates of extracurricular tutoring, effect sizes were calculated for comparing participation rates of subgroups of students. Furthermore, multi-group structural equation models were implemented to investigate average and differential effects of extracurricular tutoring, while controlling for initial reading literacy and other covariates. The results indicate that mainly students with low reading literacy and therefore a strong need for support participated in extracurricular tutoring, but the general participation rate was low. The descriptive outcomes showed a heterogeneous picture of tutoring offers and rare implementations of reading-promoting methods. Moreover, the results revealed no significant effects of extracurricular tutoring on students’ reading literacy overall but suggested marginal differences for students with a low initial reading literacy. For future studies, more detailed assessments of characteristics and methods of extracurricular tutoring are recommended, particularly, in large-scale investigations on specific tutoring methods for students with support needs which may lead to improved guidelines regarding promising implementations of evidence-based reading promoting programs.

Five Recommendations to Implementing Cross‐Age Tutoring in Reading

Five Recommendations to Implementing Cross‐Age Tutoring in Reading

Navigating the Landscape of AI in Reading: Unveiling Opportunities and Considerations

The article delves into the complex relationship between reading and artificial intelligence, examining the several ways in which AI has affected our reading behaviours. It explores the benefits that AI offers, from virtual reading tutors to individualized learning platforms. But amid the promises, there are issues like short-form content and distractions. The paper stresses the significance of a careful and balanced approach to incorporating technology in education while offering ideas for using AI to improve students' reading abilities.

“Double-Sided Learning”: A Qualitative Study of Teacher Candidate Experiences in a Virtual Reading Intervention Clinical Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the ways that teacher educators could provide teacher candidates (TCs) with clinically-rich opportunities to build TCs’ skills and self-efficacy related to teaching reading. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the experiences of 19 TCs who participated in a semester-long virtual reading tutoring program during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted semi-structured interviews, then analyzed data through inductive and deductive coding. Four themes emerged, centering (a) the impact of the pandemic on typical clinical experiences, (b) the application of coursework within this virtual clinical experience, (c) TCs’ perceptions of program elements that supported their implementation, and (d) TCs’ perceived benefit of the program for their own development as a teacher and for the reading outcomes of the children with whom they worked. We discuss implications for future work related to enhanced clinical experiences related to TCs’ implementation of reading interventions for striving readers.

Interobserver Reliability of Remote Observations

ABSTRACT Following the pandemic-related school shutdowns in spring 2020, direct observations continued to be a necessary component of special education evaluations even when students were not present at school. As students began learning at home instead of in classrooms, the continued need for observational data likely compelled most educators to use video conferencing for collecting data even though little was known about the reliability of observing students remotely. Consequently, the following is an exploratory examination of the interobserver agreement (IOA) that can occur between remote and in-person observers. Within an alternating observers design, overall IOA of 97.2% was achieved between observers who simultaneously used Ecobehavioral Assessment Systems Software (EBASS) to measure the behavior of elementary students and their instructional environments during reading tutoring. This study indicates that EBASS may be a reliable tool for observing students remotely and, in turn, emphasizes the importance of replication and experimental studies to determine whether these findings are typical, especially if millions of students continue to be taught at home.

Challenges for Designing of Children Speech Corpora: A State-of-the-Art Review

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the use of computer hardware and software-based techniques to identify and process human voices. These systems used data from both male and female speakers. The majority of commercial ASR systems available on adult speech are working efficiently. Speech data collected from both male and female speakers were used in these systems. In recent decades, ASR systems for children have emerged, such as reading tutors, aids for foreign language learning, and computer games. Child ASR systems are essential but poorly understood in the field of computer speech recognition. The child data collection is a very complex task. Child corpus is not available publicly, and variability of children speakers and ASR developed for a particular age group is not suitable for other age groups. These are some of the reasons for less and ineffective child ASR systems. However, the non-availability of child corpus publicly is a primary reason for ineffective child ASR. Designing and developing child corpus is a very tedious task. Therefore, the primary focus of this state-of-the-art review is to discuss various challenges encountered while designing and developing child corpus.

PENDAMPINGAN BELAJAR SISWA SD KELURAHAN KOTA ALAM DI MASA PANDEMI COVID-19 OLEH MAHASISWA UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH KOTABUMI

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced all parts of life to adapt. To prevent the spread of the Corona virus, learning at all levels of schools in Indonesia must be carried out using Distance Learning (PJJ). Most of the students experienced obstacles in this distance learning, for example not understanding the material, not doing assignments straightforwardly, to the inappropriate role of parents in helping students study at home. Therefore, in this activity, learning assistance is provided to students to practice academic skills and master learning objectives even in the midst of the corona virus pandemic, starting from tutoring in reading and counting, doing assignments, reading the Al-Quran and praying, as well as providing material explanations. -School material that has not been understood. The methods used in this assistance are preparation, socialization, and implementation of activities. The results obtained by students are that they can read and count well, are more active in doing all school assignments, better understand learning materials at school and are more accustomed to reading the Qur'an and reciting the Koran.

Reading Tutors’ Interpretation of Curriculum-Based Measurement Graphs

This study examined reading tutors’ interpretation of reading progress-monitoring graphs. A think-aloud procedure was used to evaluate tutors at two points in time, before and after a year of service as an AmeriCorps reading tutor. During their service, the reading tutors received extensive training and ongoing coaching. Descriptive results showed a positive change from the Time 1–think-aloud (pretest) to the Time 2–think aloud (posttest). There were statistically significant changes from Time 1 to Time 2 for the majority of graph interpretation variables measured. Data suggest that the right type of support and training may serve to enable reading tutors to develop the skills to contribute to data-based decision-making within multitiered systems.

The effects of a peer-tutoring strategy on children’s e-book reading comprehension

Reading competence is one of the most critical skills for children’s academic success. In the study reported on here we proposed an integrated peer-tutoring strategy for reading comprehension that employs e-books for elementary school students. The effects of this strategy on children’s reading comprehension were investigated using a quasi-experimental design. Three classes of 11–12-year-old students (n = 73) participated in the study for 12 weeks. Compared to the control group, students in the experimental group, who engaged in peer tutoring with e-book reading, showed significant gains in reading comprehension. Students’ perceptions of the benefits of the peer-tutoring resources to their reading are discussed. The findings demonstrate that the integration of peer tutoring in e-book reading results in an effective instructional model for the enhancement of elementary school students’ reading. Keywords: e-book; elementary school children; mobile learning; peer tutoring; reading comprehension

The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on Prek-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence

Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been conducted, varying widely in their approach, context, and cost. Our study represents the first systematic review and meta-analysis of these and earlier studies. We develop a framework for considering different types of programs to not only examine overall effects, but also explore how these effects vary by program characteristics and intervention context. We find that tutoring programs yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes, with an overall pooled effect size estimate of 0.37 SD. Effects are stronger, on average, for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Effects also tend to be strongest among the earlier grades. While overall effects for reading and math interventions are similar, reading tutoring tends to yield higher effect sizes in earlier grades, while math tutoring tends to yield higher effect sizes in later grades. Tutoring programs conducted during school tend to have larger impacts than those conducted after school. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

A Reading Tutor for Low-Literacy Adults

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the mean proficiency in literacy among adults in the US and Canada is at Level 2. Adults at this level cannot process dense texts, eliminate irrelevant information, perform multi-step operations, or evaluate the reliability of a source. The Reading Tutor is a website that was created to help low-literacy adults improve their English. It will be free to use the website that is personalized to the literacy level of every user. Creating a website allows people to increase their literacy levels without facing the stigma that comes with attending a class in person. Adults are inclined to improve their English because it often affects their career potential, socio-economic status, and health. The Reading Tutor has two major components: the passages and the scenarios. Passages are stories that the user can read and answer questions about. Scenarios are plots with questions that the user must answer to move on. In recent work, the information for each scenario was organized into spreadsheets to simplify the process of entering data into the code.
 The system architecture consists of HTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, Python, and Django. The newest development in this project was the improvement of the user intake experience. Before starting the passages and scenarios, the website collects information from each adult. The user "interests" pages are the latest additions to the site and these pages ask about the user’s hobbies. That data will then be used to incorporate their interests into later questions. It was important to add this feature to the website because relevance is a motivator for the user demographic. The next steps for the website are to log the user’s interests into the database. Future enhancements also include the creation of more scenarios to accommodate to the different user interests.

Generating Reliable Feedback About Students’ Performances Within an Automated Reading Tutor

Personalized learning technologies such as automated reading tutors have been proposed as a way to help struggling readers acquire needed skills while simultaneously encouraging engaged, sustained reading of entire books. This article investigates a key step in the development of such technologies: translating an entire novel into a sequence of nonoverlapping reading passages, so that valid feedback about students’ performances can be generated at the end of each tutoring session. A critical reliability issue that may be introduced at this step is identified, an approach for addressing that issue is proposed, and an evaluation conducted with respect to three popular middle-grade novels is presented. The findings suggest that our new approach provides more reliable evidence about students’ abilities and thus may be more appropriate for use when building automated reading tutors.

Mispronunciation Detection in Children's Reading of Sentences

This paper proposes an approach to automatically parse children's reading of sentences by detecting word pronunciations and extra content, and to classify words as correctly or incorrectly pronounced. This approach can be directly helpful for automatic assessment of reading level or for automatic reading tutors, where a correct reading must be identified. We propose a first segmentation stage to locate candidate word pronunciations based on allowing repetitions and false starts of a word's syllables. A decoding grammar based solely on syllables allows silence to appear during a word pronunciation. At a second stage, word candidates are classified as mispronounced or not. The feature that best classifies mispronunciations is found to be the log-likelihood ratio between a free phone loop and a word spotting model in the very close vicinity of the candidate segmentation. Additional features are combined in multifeature models to further improve classification, including: normalizations of the log-likelihood ratio, derivations from phone likelihoods, and Levenshtein distances between the correct pronunciation and recognized phonemes through two phoneme recognition approaches. Results show that most extra events were detected (close to 2% word error rate achieved) and that using automatic segmentation for mispronunciation classification approaches the performance of manual segmentation. Although the log-likelihood ratio from a spotting approach is already a good metric to classify word pronunciations, the combination of additional features provides a relative reduction of the miss rate of 18% (from 34.03% to 27.79% using manual segmentation and from 35.58% to 29.35% using automatic segmentation, at constant 5% false alarm rate).

Shared book reading behaviours of children with Down Syndrome before and after participation in the MultiLit reading tutor program: an exploratory study

This exploratory study compares the shared book reading behaviours of five school aged children with DS (aged 11 years 6 months to 15 years 6 months) before and after participation in an intervention which included selected components of the MultiLit Reading Tutor Program. The program was delivered 1:1 to participants each week over a 12 week period. Analysis of the average performance across the group revealed that the proportion of reading errors relative to the number of words read from preintervention to postintervention were significantly reduced. Significant improvement was also seen in shared book reading fluency following intervention. Individual case study data is also presented. Postintervention, reading errors per minute were reduced for two participants (P4 and P5). Reading dysfluencies per minute decreased for two participants (P1 and P5) while all participants improved in shared book reading fluency. Preliminary results suggest that children with DS can generalise skills taught in the MultiLit Reading Tutor Program to shared book reading, although variability regarding changes in literacy abilities postintervention was observed.

High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City

This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City Public Schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across three years, schools offered at least 130 hours of 4-on-1 tutoring based on a guided reading model, which consisted of 1-on-1 read alouds, independent reading, vocabulary review, and group discussion. We show that, at the mean, tutoring has a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive, but insignificant, effect on English Language Arts (ELA) state test scores and no effect on math state test scores. There is important heterogeneity by race. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points (control mean 92.4 percent) and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year – two times larger than the effect of the Promise Academy Middle School in the Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP Charter Middle Schools on reading achievement. For Hispanic students, the treatment effect is 0.8 percentage points on attendance (control mean 92.0 percent) and 0.01 standard deviations per year on ELA scores. We argue that the difference between the effectiveness of tutoring for black and Hispanic students is best explained by the average tutor characteristics at the schools they attend.

The Use of Smartphone for Learning Activities by University Students in Kuwait

There has been a shortage of relevant studies concerning Smartphone usage in Kuwait by people in general and students in particular. The aim of this study was therefore twofold: (i) to explore the use of Smartphone for learning purposes among universities' students in Kuwait and (ii) to identify if there are any socio-demographic differences in this usage among universities' students. A questionnaire with 376 students was conducted in order to achieve the study objectives. The results showed that generally students always used their Smartphones at their homes and they sometimes used these phones in recreation places and transportation, at university, and while walking. Also, they always used their Smartphones to do ten learning activities namely checking the exams schedule, checking class timetable, checking grades, login to the university portal, using blackboard (LMS), using it to participate in the class learning groups, downloading class material, registering courses, reading tutors' announcements, and payment of fees. Moreover, social networking, learning, privacy, and safety were important reasons for owning/using Smartphones by students. Furthermore, the study found that at least one learning activity that students did using their Smartphones varies according to at least one of seven socio-demographic variables (i.e., gender, major, nationality, brand of Smartphone, using it for the first time, age range and level of study). In contrast, one demographic variable has no effect on any of the learning activities (i.e., marital status). Several recommendations were suggested based on these findings that may improve the effectiveness of Smartphone usage among universities' students in Kuwait.

Teachers Engaging Parents as Reading Tutors

This study examined the application of evidence-based tutoring for oral reading fluency (ORF) to a natural setting, using teachers as parent trainers. Three teachers were trained in a 3-h workshop to develop individualized tutoring programs with parents. Following training, the teachers trained four parents to use individualized tutoring programs. A multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate the effects of teacher training on parents’ use of evidence-based reading strategies. Students’ ORF outcomes were also measured at pre and post. Following training, three parents showed immediate improvement in their use of evidence-base strategies. Parent tutoring produced some improvements in students’ ORF. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of teachers engaging parents as active participants in their child’s learning. Discussion focuses on the need for additional research in natural settings to more closely examine the conditions needed for successful implementation of parent-tutoring programs.

First steps toward critical literacy: Interactions with an English narrative text among three English as a foreign language readers in South Korea

Three Korean children, whose English reading test scores were comparably lower than their peers' and who showed a tendency to withdraw from class activities or resist texts, participated in a reading tutoring programme in South Korea. By reflecting on the three students' interactions with an English text, the current paper argues that resistant readers' mere understanding of texts can be deepened while they diversify their perspectives for viewing textual messages and beliefs. In the process, with a range of explicit scaffolding, the students' resistance could be harnessed as a meaningful opportunity to promote multiple perspectives regarding texts and sociocultural practices. This article suggests that letting students develop multiple perspectives based on critical reflections on texts and sociocultural practices, by being exposed to a variety of books and engaging in critical analysis, should be a vital component of literacy classrooms.

The Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo: its development, enhancement and use

The Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo: its development, enhancement and useThe paper presents the on-line Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo, in particular the ways in which it has been used, and how it has been extended with examples mined from a parallel corpus. The paper first describes jaSlo and the structure of its dictionary entry, its Web interface for searching, and an analysis of the access logs. The use of jaSlo in the context of the Japanese reading-support tool Reading Tutor is described next, again followed by an analysis of the access logs. Also discussed is the manner in which usage examples were added to the dictionary, and an evaluation of their usefulness. The paper concludes with directions for further work.

Speech Recognition Software Contributes to Reading Development for Young Learners of English

Thirty-six English language learners aged 6;8 to 12;6 years received practice with The Reading Tutor, which uses speech recognition to listen to oral reading and provides context-sensitive feedback. A crossover research design controlled effects of classroom instruction. The first subgroup worked with the software for 3.5 months, and following a week's crossover period, the second subgroup worked for a subsequent 3.5 months. Both groups were assessed to obtain comparable gains both in regular classroom with English as an Additional Language (EAL) support and in the classroom condition with EAL support plus the Reading Tutor. Oral reading fluency was assessed by the DIBELS measure. Fluency was also calculated by the program, and grade level of materials mastered was assessed by the software's logs. Both groups made significant gains in oral reading fluency and grade level of materials mastered, according to measures internal to the software. For one period, gains in fluency following experience with the program appeared to have been slightly larger than gains with regular classroom instruction and EAL support only.