Arthur Ward

Interactive stories and motivation to read in the raft dyslexia fluency tutor

Improving motivation to read is an important step toward improving reading fluency among children with dyslexia. We describe a test of the RAFT dyslexia fluency tutor which dynamically generates an interactive story by assembling pre-written scene templates in response to user-chosen plot events. Results suggest that interactivity improved voluntary reading, relative to non-interactive versions of the story.

Predicting Learning in Tutoring with the Landscape Model of Memory

A Landscape Model analysis, adopted from the text processing literature, was run on transcripts of tutoring sessions, and a technique developed to count the occurrence of key physics points in the resulting connection matrices. This point-count measure was found to be well correlated with learning.