Representing the AdultEd research team, John Hollander,  Dr. John Sabatini, and Dr. Teneha O'Reilly will present research at the 2023 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting.

On April 15, 2023, they will lead the presentation titled “The Reading Skills Bottleneck Across Middle Grades." In this presentation, the researchers explore how skilled reading involves the efficient coordination of several print and linguistic skills. In late elementary grades, instruction involving reading in school often shifts in focus from learning to read to reading to learn. However, many students at this stage do not have well-developed foundational reading skill sets, and cannot benefit from comprehension instruction as efficiently as their peers. This study examined a large-scale dataset of middle-grades students using a reading skills assessment. Results indicate that students with better foundational skills are more likely to score higher on higher-level reading measures, and the size of this gap increases across grade levels, suggesting a “rich-get-richer” effect as typical instruction fails to fully address the needs of those who struggle with foundational skills.

Representing the AdultEd research team, Dr. John Sabatini joins CREATE network on April 5, 2023 to present research at the 2023 Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE) National Conference.

Dr. Stephanie Cronen, Dr. Jen Vanek, Dr. Ann Edwards, Lewis Hosie, Dr. Javier Suarez-Alvarez, Dr. Elizabeth Tighe, Dr. John Sabatini, Dr. Stephen Sireci, and Dr. Daphne Greenberg led a presentation titled “CREATE Adult Skills Network: Updates on Year 2 R&D for Technology-Enabled Instruction and Assessment."

In this presentation, the researchers introduced the CREATE network and projects in the network. Like AutoTutor-ARC, these projects target adult education. 

Representing the AdultEd research team, Dr. John Sabatini, Dr. Art Graesser, Dr. Xiangen Hu, and John Hollander presented their research at the meeting of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive Testing.

This team presented a symposium titled "Developing a system that connects learning and adaptive testing for adults learning to read,” featuring four interconnected research presentations. These talks described a technological and statistical framework for integrating two systems: an intelligent tutoring system and a reading skills assessment battery. The two systems were initially developed separately and now, through a grant from the US DOE Institute for Education Research, are being brought together. To discuss this work and its implications, we will a) describe an adaptive intelligent tutoring system designed to support reading comprehension gains in adults with low literacy, b) describe a multi-stage assessment system used to measure a specific set of component reading skills to differentiate between struggling and proficient readers, c) seek to establish a technological and logistical framework for linking adaptive assessment and instruction and d) report empirical efforts to psychometrically align the above systems and frameworks.

Hollander, J., Sabatini, J., Graesser, A. (2022, September) Connecting assessment and learning in the inner loop. Presented at the 8th Meeting of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive testing.

Hu, X., Sabatini, J., Graesser, J., Hollander, J. (2022, September). Designing innovative tasks and test environments: Opportunities and challenges in connecting assessment and instruction. Presented at the 8th Meeting of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive testing.

Sabatini, J., Weeks, J., O’Reilly, T.  (2022, September). A stage-based computer adaptive system combining reading components and scenario based assessments in a longitudinal study. Presented at the 8th Meeting of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive testing.

Graesser, A., Hu, X., Sabatini, J., Hollander, J. (2022, September). AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension: An intelligent tutoring system. Presented at the 8th Meeting of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive testing.