iSTART-Early: Interactive Strategy Training for Early Readers

In this paper, we present iSTART-Early, an intelligent tutoring system that provides automated instruction and practice on higher-order reading comprehension strategies to 3rd and 4th grade students. iSTART-Early provides personalized, interactive, game-based strategy instruction and practice on comprehension strategies (i.e., Ask It, Reword It, Find It, Explain It, and Summarize It) with grade-appropriate informational texts. Natural language processing (NLP) combined with automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech technologies enable immediate formative and summative feedback. A teacher interface allows teachers to assign texts and monitor students' performance so that they can provide additional support and feedback when necessary, creating blended-learning opportunities. We describe the interface and the development of iSTART-Early, as well as our plans to examine the intelligent tutoring system for usability, feasibility and promise in improving reading comprehension strategies and outcomes for young readers.