The primary goal of this project is develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to address challenges in acquiring literary ("Tier 2") words from written contexts. The benefits of the resulting intervention will be tested among 6th-8th grade children enrolled in an after-school program for economically disadvantaged students. We will address questions about optimal conditions for contextual word learning, including factors supporting robust, incremental gains in word knowledge and strategies for using specific context cues to guess the meaning of an unknown word in context.

Setting: Participating middle schools will be located in Atlanta, Georgia and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Falk School (Pittsburgh site) will participate in initial feasibility testing and iterative development. Atlanta schools will serve as the testbed for initial (pilot) evaluation of outcomes for low-SES students, including a large number of students at risk of academic failure.

Sample: Initial studies will be carried out in Years 1 and 2 at Falk School in Pittsburgh, and in Year 2 at schools in the Atlanta Public School system. In year 3, an evaluation (pilot) study will be carried out in five Title 1 schools within the Atlanta Public School system. For this Year 3 study, we will recruit a total of 300 students (grades 6-8). One-hundred percent of the participants will qualify for free or reduced lunch. The sample will comprise ~97% African-American students and will be approximately evenly divided into girls and boys.

Intervention: The proposed research will develop and test a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that exposes learners to new words in a variety of well-controlled contexts. It will use computational methods to estimate changes in partial word knowledge and will provide strategy training to promote effective use of context cues to meaning. Study findings will inform a follow-on Goal 3 proposal to test the efficacy and effectiveness of the intervention.

Research Design and Methods: The initial ITS version will be developed in Year 1. System refinements and feasibility studies will occur in Year 2. Year 3 will be devoted to a pilot study evaluating the beneficial outcomes of the intervention, based on a randomized controlled trial design, with the treatment condition being the use of the ITS-based intervention.