ABSTRACT
Instruction with the structure strategy has shown improvement on measures of reading comprehension for a wide variety of readers of all ages. Teaching this strategy primarily has involved traditional classroom instruction or one-on-one tutoring. We have created a Web-based intelligent tutoring system to present the strategy to middle school students. A total of 95 lessons (65 regular lessons and 30 parallel lessons for choice of text topic to boost motivation) containing 145 text selections were programmed into an intelligent tutoring system that was Web based, interactive, and multimedia based. The student and interaction models of the system included prior knowledge performance on the current task. The assessment tools included a parse tree based on the propositional analysis in the content structures and latent semantic indexing. Findings from pilot investigations in the development of the intelligent tutor are presented along with preliminary findings from a study run in two public schools.
