Northern Illinois University

This purpose of this project is to conduct a pilot study to test the potential efficacy of Brief Intervention Group Support (BIGS), a broad Tier 2 intervention for students with elevated social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) concerns at risk for emotional and behavioral disabilities. Within a multi-tiered systems of support framework, Tier 2 interventions are provided to at-risk students who need additional intervention, beyond Tier 1 instruction. However, many such interventions are for s...

Higher education faces a crisis in that a number of students who start college are not sufficiently ready to read to be successful in their courses. Being underprepared to read has negative implications on students' likelihood of obtaining a degree and obtaining a successful career. Consequently, institutions of higher education invest money and resources to help under prepared students. This project was conducted under the assumption that these efforts are facilitated with a clear understan...

This study is a response to the many calls from across the nation for implementing "an effective, realistic, affordable, and politically acceptable long-term approach to the well-known problems and opportunities of U.S. pre-K-16 STEM education" (National Science Board, May 2006). As an initial step to developing an intelligent computerized tutor for teaching scientific inquiry skills, the researchers will build an intelligent computerized tutor and information delivery system (Acquiring Rese...

In earlier work, this research team found significant deficits in college students' ability to comprehend, evaluate, and produce arguments. Argumentation is a central component of social and personal decision-making, as well as a fundamental skill required by many postsecondary class assignments and by entrance exams to graduate-level education (e.g., SAT, LSAT, and GRE). However, many postsecondary students leave high school unable to comprehend or write arguments. The researchers' previous...

In this project, the researchers proposed to develop and test a new automated on-line reading strategy assessment tool called the Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (R-SAT). In the early 2000s, research suggested that students' difficulty with reading does not arise from a deficient in component language skills, such as word decoding, but from not being able to form coherent representations of the text. Readers who adopt a low standard of coherence read passively, creating a sparse and perhaps...

In this study, the researchers aimed to understand how undergraduate students identify, represent, and construct both simple and complex arguments.