The Efficacy of iSTART Extended Practice: Low Ability Students Catch Up

摘要

iSTART is an Intelligent Tutoring System designed to improve students' reading comprehension skills. iSTART was the main component in a long term experiment (across a full academic year) with 389 students who completed a pretest, interacted with iSTART for 6 months, and then completed a posttest. A new extended practice module was implemented, which provided students with repeated practice across a variety of texts. Analyses found improvement in performance for all students, and indicate that students' initial self-explanation abilities may differ, but these abilities improve and converge as a function of practice.