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In recent years, there has been a growing concern that high school students in the United States have been falling in terms of their reading ability and science knowledge. Project Strategies is a 5-year National Science Foundation grant designed to address high school students comprehension in their science courses. The project incorporates a team of approximately 15 scientists from multidisciplinary fields including cognitive psychology, computer science, linguistics, school psychology, and discourse processes.
The project has three major phases. Phase one includes the assessment of student abilities including reading ability, knowledge, strategy use, demographics, student activities and habits. The second phase concerns the design and evaluation of various learning strategies intended to improve students achievement by targeting how students learn new information and solve problems. The third phase of the project is geared towards the development of an automated computer tutor called iSTART. The tutor bridges the information gained in phases one and two to produce a strategy trainer that can be incorporated in the classroom. iSTART teaches students to be more effective readers and thinkers; the benefits of which are expected to generalize beyond the classroom.
Grant Proposal
Referred journal publications
McNamara, D.S., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Learning from text: Effects of prior knowledge and text coherence. Discourse Processes, 22, 247-287.[pdf]
McNamara, D.S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N.B., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good texts always better? Text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14, 1-43.[pdf]
McNamara, D.S. (2003). SERT: Self-explanation reading training. Submitted toCognition and Instruction [pdf]
Referred conference publications
Cottrell, K., & McNamara, D.S. (2002). Cognitive precursors to science comprehension. Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.[pdf]
McNamara, D.S., & Scott, J.L. (1999). Training reading strategies. Proceedings of the Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.[pdf]
McNamara, D.S., & Scott, J.L. (1999). Training self-explanation and reading strategies. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-third Annual Meeting. Houston, TX: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.
OReilly, T., & McNamara, D.S. (2002). Whats a science student to do? Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.[pdf]
Non-referred publications
McNamara, D.S. (1998). Training self-explanation strategies: Effects of prior domain knowledge and reading skill. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 1247). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
McNamara, D.S. (2001). Speed reading. N.J. Smelser & P.B. Bates (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science.
McNamara, D.S., & OReilly, T. (2002).Learning: Knowledge Acquisition, Representation, and Organization. J.W. Guthrie et al. (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Macmillan Reference [pdf]