Research on and With Novel Educational Technologies for Comprehension
Description:
Purpose: In this project, the researchers proposed to develop a series of computer-managed instructional activities to help students who enter the learning environment with small vocabularies acquire the larger vocabularies necessary for high-level comprehension. These new automated assessment tools can be embedded in ongoing reading and writing activities within an automated literacy tutor.
Project Activities: This project leveraged Latent Semantic Analysis, a machine learning method that simulates human understanding of words and text, that members of this team helped develop. These novel, computer-managed activities engage, assess, and exemplify precise use of words in connected discourse. The technologies were evaluated in laboratory experiments and field trials through the ongoing IERI Colorado Literacy project (CLP). Researchers carried out laboratory research to analyze the cognitive processes measured and affected, and guide design of new interventions.
Key Outcomes: As described in the publications below, the project team developed the following tools:
PRODUCTS AND PUBLICATIONS
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Dennis, S. (2003). An alignment-based account of serial recall. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 25, No. 25).
Dennis, S. (2005). An Exemplar-Based Approach to Unsupervised Parsing. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 583—588). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dennis, S. (2004). An unsupervised method for the extraction of propositional information from text. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101 (suppl_1), 5206–5213.
Dennis, S. (2005). A memory-based theory of verbal cognition. Cognitive Science, 29 (2), 145–193.
Dennis, S. (2007). Introducing Word Order in an LSA Framework. In T. Landauer, D. McNamara, S. Dennis, and W. Kintsch (Eds.), Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis (pp. 449—466). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Doxas, I., Dennis, S., and Oliver, W. (2007). The Dimensionality of Language. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 227—232). New York: Erlbaum.
Harrington, M., & Dennis, S. (2003). Structural priming in sentence comprehension. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 25, No. 25).
Kintsch, W., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S., and Landauer, T.K. (2007). LSA and Meaning: In Theory and Application. In T. Landauer, D. McNamara, S. Dennis, and W. Kintsch (Eds.), Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis (pp. 467—480). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Landauer, T.K. (2007). LSA as a Theory of Meaning. In T. Landauer, D. McNamara, S. Dennis, and W. Kintsch (Eds.), Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis (pp. 3—35). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Steyvers, M., Griffiths, T.L., and Dennis, S. (2006). Probabilistic Inference in Human Semantic Memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (7): 327—334.