Project Activities
The ELCII intervention will use fiction and nonfiction videos to teach students vocabulary and inference making skills. It will also include modules that allow teachers to transfer the skills learned in the ELCII software into the classroom. In the first year of the project, the researchers will develop the ELCII software, conduct lab testing, and a brief test to see if the software is usable and feasible in classrooms. In the second year, researchers will make revisions to the software, and develop teacher materials and manuals. Finally, in the third year, the researchers will conduct a pilot study in which students will be randomly assigned to receive either ELCII or the literacy instruction that is already in place in their classrooms.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This project will take place in urban, rural, and suburban schools in Minnesota.
Sample
Participants in this study will include approximately 870 kindergarten students, their 36 teachers, and six parents of kindergarteners.
Intervention
ELCII will be designed to improve reading comprehension for kindergarten students by focusing on inference making. The intervention will be interactive, automated, and cloud-based, with twenty-four thirty-minute learning modules that engage students to watch fiction and nonfiction videos, to learn academic vocabulary from the videos, to respond to inferential questions both during and after viewing the videos, and to receive scaffolding and specific feedback after each inferential question. ELCII will also include eighteen thirty-minute transfer modules during which the teacher will use an interactive questioning activity while reading a narrative of informational text to a small group of children. The final version of ELCII will include manuals and fidelity tools.
Research design and methods
Iterative development of ELCII will take place over the first two years of the project. Researchers will select fiction and nonfiction videos and create learning modules around the videos. Focus groups of literacy experts and parents will provide input and feedback on cultural sensitivity, usability, and feasibility. Field tests will provide information to the researchers on usability, feasibility, and how well the intervention is working. Transfer modules will also be created and field tested. For the pilot study in the third year, 30 teachers and their 750 kindergarten students will be randomly assigned to either an ELCII treatment condition or a business-as-usual control condition.
Control condition
In the control condition, students receive standard classroom practices in place at the school.
Key measures
Questionnaires, logs, and bug sheets will be used to assess feasibility and usability. The Test of Language Competence-Expanded (TLC-E) Listening Comprehension: Making Inferences subtest will be used to assess language comprehension at pre-test. Student outcome measures include a video comprehension measure to assess inference skills, and QRI-5 to assess inference and comprehension in reading contexts. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test will be used to assess reading comprehension. Finally, the FAST early Reading battery will be used to assess decoding, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth edition will be used to assess vocabulary, and the Automated Working Memory Assessment will be used to assess working memory.
Data analytic strategy
Researchers will use multilevel models with students nested within teachers to examine the promise of ELCII for improving kindergarten students' outcomes. The research team will enter covariates such as instructional condition and pretest scores into the models.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products: The products of this project will be a fully developed ELCII intervention, evidence of ELCII's promise to improve student reading outcomes, and peer reviewed publications.
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications
Book chapters
Butterfuss, R., Kim, J., & Kendeou, P. (2020). Reading Comprehension. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. doi:dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.865 Full text
Journal articles
Butterfuss, R., & Kendeou, P. (2018). The role of executive functions in reading comprehension. Educational Psychology Review, 30, 801-826. Full text
Butterfuss, R., &Kendeou, P.(2021).KReC-MD: Knowledge revision with multiple documents. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 1475-1497. Full text
Butterfuss, R., Kendeou, P., McMaster, K. L., Orcutt, E., & Bulut, O. (2022). Question timing, language comprehension, and executive function in inferencing. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26,61-78.
Kendeou, P., McMaster, K. L., Butterfuss, R., Kim, J., Slater, S., & Bulut, O. (2020). Development and validation of the Minnesota Inference Assessment. Assessment for Effective Intervention. doi/10.1177/1534508420937781
Kendeou, P., McMaster, K., Butterfuss, R., Kim, J., Bresina, B., & Wagner, K. (2019). The Inferential Language Comprehension (iLC) Framework. Topics in Cognitive Science, 12,256-273. Full text
McMaster, K. L., Kendeou, P., Bresina, B., Slater, S., Wagner, K., White, M. J., Butterfuss, R., Kim, J., & Umana, C. (2019). Interactive web-based inference instruction for children in the primary grades. L1 - Educational Studies in Languages and Literature, 1-30.Full text
Proceedings
Burey, J., Kim, J., McMaster, K. L., & Kendeou, P. (2022). Does it work for everyone? The effect of ELCII on kindergarteners' inference skill development. International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting 2022, Hiroshima, Japan.
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Kristen McMaster
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
