Interactive Paraphrase Training: The Development and Testing of an iSTART Module

  • Authors:

  • Danielle S. McNamara;Chutima Boonthum;Christopher A. Kurby;Joe Magliano;Srinivasa Pillarisetti;Cedrick Bellissens

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Memphis;Hampton University;University of Memphis;Northern Illinois University;University of Memphis;University of Memphis

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Learning Systems that Care: From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Comprehension of science texts is challenging, particularly when the reader lacks the skills or knowledge necessary to fill in conceptual gaps in the text content. The iSTART system was developed to help readers learn and practice reading strategies to improve their ability to comprehend challenging text. This study describes a new iSTART module recently developed and tested, called Interactive Paraphrasing (IP), in which students are interactively and adaptively taught how to paraphrase sentences. We compared the effects of iSTART to iSTART with IP (IP-iSTART) with high school students on their strategy use and ability to comprehend text. IP-iSTART increased skilled readers' self-explanation quality, improved their ability to answer online comprehension questions, and increased their use of paraphrases after training. Less skilled readers benefited most in self-explanation quality from the original version of iSTART. Results are discussed in terms of tailoring reading strategy training to the needs of the reader.