This monograph describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities as it  assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 2010; 1995) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen in context; how they are represented; and how they are distributed and experienced in space. Along with this, the methodology is described for increasing construct validity (Cook and Campbell, 1979; Campbell & Stanley, 1966) and the creation of a nomological network Cronbach & Meehl (1955). This description of the methodology is contextualized with a study examining the literate practices of reluctant middle school readers playing video games (Dubbels, 2008). The study utilizes variables from empirical laboratory research on discourse processing (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1996) to analyze the narrative discourse of a video game as a socio-cognitive practice (Gee, 2007; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996).
Keywords:
Cognitive Ethnography, Methodology, Design, Game Studies, Validity, Comprehension, Discourse Processing, Reading, Literacy, Socio-Cognitive.
INTRODUCTION
As a methodological approach, cognitive ethnography assumes that cognition is distributed through rules, roles, language, relationships and coordinated activities, and can be embodied in artifacts and objects (Dubbels, 2008). For this reason, cognitive ethnography is an effective way to study activity systems like games, models, and simulations –whether mediated digitally or not.
BACKGROUND
In its traditional form, ethnography often involves the researcher living in the community of study, learning the language, doing what members of the community do—learning to see the world as it is seen by the natives in their cultural context, Fetterman (1998).
Cognitive ethnography follows the same protocol, but its purpose is to understand cognitive process and context—examining them together, thus, eliminating the false dichotomy between psychology and anthropology.
Observational techniques such as ethnography and cognitive ethnography attempt to describe and look at relations and interaction situated in the spaces where they are native. There are a number of advantages to both laboratory observation and in the wild as presented in Figure 1.
NOMOLOGICAL NETWORK
As mentioned, Cognitive Ethnography can be used as an attempt to provide evidence of construct validity. This approach, developed by Cronbach & Meehl (1955), posits that a researcher should provide a theoretical framework for what is being measured, an empirical framework for how it is to be measured, and specification of the linkage between these two frameworks. The idea is to link the conceptual/theoretical with the observable and examine the extent to which a construct, such as comprehension, behaves as it was expected to within a set of related constructs. One should attempt to demonstrate convergent validity by showing that measures that are theoretically supposed to be highly interrelated are, in practice, highly interrelated, and, that measures that shouldn’t be related to each other in fact are not.
This approach, the Nomological network is intended to increase construct validity, and external validity, as will be used in the example, the generalization from one study context, such as the laboratory, to another context, i.e., people, places, times. When we claim construct validity, we are essentially claiming that our observed pattern — how things operate in reality — corresponds with our theoretical pattern — how we think the world works. To do this, it is important to move outside of laboratory settings to observe the complex ways in which individuals and groups adapt to naturally occurring, culturally constituted activities.  By extending theory building with different approaches to research questions, and move from contexts observed in the wild, then refined in the laboratory, and then used as a lens in field observation.
The pattern fits deductive/ inductive framework:
- Deductive: theory, hypothesis, observation, and confirmation
- Inductive: observation, pattern, tentative hypothesis,
These two approaches to research have a different purpose and approach. Most social research involves both inductive and deductive reasoning processes at some time in the project. It may be more reasonable to look at deductive/inductive approaches as a mixed, circular approach. Since cognition can be seen as embodied in cultural artifacts and behavior, cognitive ethnography is an apt methodology for the study of learning with games, in virtual worlds, and the study of activity systems, whether they are mediated digitally or not. By using the deductive/inductive approach, and expanding observation, one can contrast and challenge theoretical arguments by testing in expanded context.
Cognitive ethnography emphasizes inductive field observation, but also uses theory in a deductive process to analyze behavior. This approach is useful to increase external validity, operationalize terms, and develop content validity through expanding a study across new designs, across different time frames, in different programs, from different observational contexts, and with different groups (Cook and Campbell, 1979; Campbell & Stanley, 1966).
More specifically, cognitive ethnography emphasizes observation and key feature analysis of space, objects, concepts, actions, tools, rules, roles, and language. Study of these features can help the researcher determine the organization, transfer, and representation of information (Hutchins, 2010; 1995).
Ontology/Purpose
As stated, cognitive ethnography assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings. Therefore, the role of cognitive ethnographer is to transform observational data and interpretation into meaningful representations so that cognitive properties of the system become visible (Hutchins, 2010; 1995).
According to Hutchins (2010) study of the space where an activity takes place is a primary feature of observation in cognitive ethnography. He lists three kinds of important spaces for consideration (See Figure 2)
APPLICABILITY
Just as a book is organized to present information, games also structure narratives, and are themselves cultural artifacts containing representation of tools, rules, language, and context (Dubbels, 2008). This makes cognitive ethnography an apt methodology for the study of games, simulations, narrative, and human interaction in authentic context.
Because this emphasis on space is also indicative of current approaches to literacy (Leander, 2002; Leander & Sheehy, 2004); as well as critical science and the studied interaction between the internal world of the self and the structures found in the world, and how we communicate about them (Soja, 1996; Lefebvre, 1994); also from the tradition of ecological views on cognitive psychological perspectives (Gibson, 1986),; and in the case of the example, Discourse Processing (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1996). Because of the emphasis in ontology and purpose of the method align so closely with the variables identified in the Discourse Processing model (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1996), it was applicable as a methodological approach to create a convergence of theory and tradition predicated upon an approach that aligns in purpose with analysis and question.
EXAMPLE
As an example, Dubbels (2008) used cognitive ethnography to observe video game play at an afterschool video game club. The purpose of this observation was to explore video game play as a literate practice in an authentic context. The cognitive ethnography methodology was recruited to utilize peer reviewed empirical research from laboratory studies—utilizing narrative discourse processing to interpret the key variables—to extend construct validity and observe whether the laboratory outcomes appeared in authentic, native contexts.
This allowed the researcher to interpret observations of authentic video game play in an authentic space through the lens of empirical laboratory work at an afterschool video game club.
Guiding question
The focus on space and social context, and the methodology for this example of cognitive ethnography explored a statement from O’Brien & Dubbels (2004, p. 2),
Reading is more unlike the reading students are doing outside of school than at any point in the recent history of secondary schools, and high stakes, print-based assessments are tapping skills and strategies that are increasingly unlike those that adolescents use from day to day.
These day-to-day skills and strategies were viewed as literate practice and theoretically.
They led to the guiding question:
- Can games be described as a literate practice as has been described by theoreticians?
If so, this should be apparent through:
- Observing game play
- Understanding the game narrative and controls,
- And doing analysis of interaction and behavior. Â Â Should the words behind the bullets be capitalized since you have it in sentence form?
Hypothesis
The guiding question: whether games could be viewed as a literate practice was extended to create a hypothesis to test:
- Can the literate practice of gaming be used to facilitate greater success with printed text?
The hypothesis would be tested through examination of game play narratives and printed text narratives—as described in the Nomological network section; this would be an deductive/inductive process. The use of the variables from the Event Indexing Model could be used for identifying levels of discourse and the ability to create a mental representation after the inductive observation process.
The hypothesis was predicated upon the theory that familiarity with patterns in text, from symbolic representations such as words, sentences, images, and story grammars. The story grammar being “once upon a time,†in a game might be used as a developmental analog to help struggling readers predict the structure and purpose of print narratives by helping them to expect certain events, characters, and settings and help the reader to become more efficient. In essence, they would have expectations that “once upon a time†leads to “happily ever afterâ€, and other genre patterns attributable to transmedial narrative genre patterns.
The theory is that a reader may be capable of compensation, i.e., the use genre patterns and predictive inference as higher-level process in order to support lower-level process (Stanovich, 2000). It was proposed that to develop meaningful comprehension, the propositional and situation levels might be built upon for building mental representation of printed narrative text with the game.
Context and Variables for Coding and Analysis
Literate activities were codified based upon a well-established model of discourse processing, The Event Indexing Model (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1996). The Event Indexing Model offered five levels of discourse processing: Surface Level, Propositional Level, Situation Level, Genre Level, and Author Communication.
These levels offer an opportunity to view comprehension as a transmedial trait across discourse.
The Situation Level (figure 5) is composed of two sub-levels of the variable. These are aspects of mental representation called the Dimensions of Mental Representation and are composed of: time, space, characters, causation, and goals.  These variables of the discourse-processing model were used to code the transcripts from the game club audio/video games, and context in order to explore the familiarity the students had with patterns in discourse, and their ability to recognize and process them. In order to observe the literate activities of students in their chosen medium, we offered the after school game club to students who had been selected by school district professionals for reading remediation courses outside of the mainstream. The video game play and activity space was analyzed from direct observation and analysis of audio/video recordings and photos taken during the activity.
Conceptual Space Analysis
Walkthroughs of the game were used to look at decision making through navigation of the game.
A Walkthrough, according to Dubbels (in Beach, Anson, Breuch, & Swiss eds, 2009), is a document that describes how to proceed through a level or particular game challenge. Walkthroughs are created by the game developer or players and often include video, audio, text, and static images—offering strategies, maps through levels, the locations of objects, and important and subtle elements of the game.
In order to have a thorough understanding of possible the goals, actions, and behaviors available in the game, a number of walkthroughs were analyzed along with the game controls, and maps for optimal play—Figure 4.
Physical Space Analysis
To create the cognitive ethnography of the video game play, two video captures were used: one to record the screen activity, and one to record player interaction with the game and play space. Because the player of the game was often highly engaged with problem solving and reacting to the game environment, there was often little-to-no dialog or variation in expression and body language – however, play was often done in the company of others. This was informative as the discussion, encouragement, and advice displayed the social and cultural knowledge of the strategies of game play. In addition, a still camera was made available for the students to take pictures for their club. This included digital pictures of the games screens and each other playing, or whatever they felt was interesting.
Social Space Analysis
The audio and video, and still images were used for analysis of the social space, as well as the physical space. However, another level of data collection involved showing the player the video recording of their play and action in the room were used for a “reflect aloud†(Ericsson & Simon, 1983) for them to describe their play and social interaction. The key feature was not only observing the play, but also identifying theories of relationships, cognition and social learning—“what were you thinking there?†was the main question asked. This dialogue served to explain the player’s reasoning and decisions without overt interpretation by the observer. This enhanced the description, and connected the naturalistic game play to the laboratory, and then back to behavior in the wild.
It was this exploration of theory that led to the study of struggling readers using video games as methods for observing levels of mental representation and recall in game play and reading. Using the Cognition Ethnographic approach allowed for comparison of students observed playing video games with friends, the dialog and behaviors that constituted game play as a literacy (Gee, 2007; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996.) and their formal academic reading behaviors. Because the boys were observed in a formal laboratory setting, it was possible to make comparisons of their game play in the informal, or wild, autonomy supporting space.
Examples of Analysis
An example of the game play observation comes from Dubbels (2008, p. 265):
Since Darius seemed to know what he was talking about, he went next, and as he played, the other boys watched and were excited with what Darius was able to do. Darius seemed happy to demonstrate what he knew. While I was recording, the boys described Darius’ play and shared ideas enthusiastically about how the game worked and looked forward to their chance to play. As Darius made a move where he showed how to do a double bomb jump, the boys watched intently. The way it was explained was that you lay a bomb, and right before that bomb explodes, set a second one, then set a third just before you reach the very top of the jump. You should fall and land said the easiest way “is to count out: 1, 2, 3, 4.â€
And he laid the bombs on 1, 3, and 4. The boys were excited about this, as well as Darius’ willingness to show them. What was clear was that Darius had not only had played the game before, and as I questioned him more later I found that he had read about it and applied what he had read. He had performed a knowledge act demonstrating comprehension.
The other boys were eager to try some of the things Darius had shown them, and Darius was happy to relinquish the controller. What happened from there was that Darius watched for a while and then walked over to the Xbox, and then to the bank of computers. I left the camera to record the boys paying Metroid Prime and I walked over to see what Darius was doing. He showed me a site on the Internet where he was reading about the game. He had gone to a fan site where another gamer had written a record of what each section of the game was like, what the challenges were, cool things to do, and cool things to find. I asked him if this was cheating; he said “maybe†and smiled. He said that it made the game more fun and that he could find more “cool stuff†and it helps him to understand how to win easier and what to look for.
This idea of secondary sources to better understand the game makes a lot of sense to me. It is a powerful strategy that informs comprehension as described previously in this chapter. The more prior knowledge a person has before reading or playing, the more likely they are to comprehend it fully. Secondary sources can help the player by supporting them in preconceiving the dimensions of Level 3 in the comprehension model, and with that knowledge, the player may have an understanding of what to expect, what to do, and where to focus attention for better success. Darius has clearly displayed evidence that he knows what it takes to be a competent comprehender He had clearly done the work in looking for secondary sources and was motivated to read with a specific purpose—to know what games he wants to try and to be good at those games. His use of secondary sources showed that he was able to draw information from a variety of sources, synthesize them, and apply his conclusion with practice to see if it works.
One of the key features of the cognitive ethnography is the realization that even the smallest of human activities are loaded with interesting cognitive phenomena. In order to do this correctly, one should choose an activity setting for observation, establish rapport, and record what is happening to stop the action for closer scrutiny. This can be done with photos, video, audio recording, and notebook. The key feature is event segmentation, structure in the events, and then interpretation.
As was presented in the passage from Dubbels (2008), analysis was done describing the social network surrounding the game play of one boy describing the different spaces, and the behaviors of the boys surrounding him. The link to game play and strategy for successfully navigating the video game can be considered an analog to how young people read print text when a model is used as a framework for analysis.
One can then connect the cultural organization with the observed processes of meaning making. This allows patterns and coherence in the data to become visible through identification of logical relations and cultural schemata. This allowed for description of engaged learning when the video students approached the game, their social relations, and how they managed the information related to success in the game, reading the directions, taking direction from others, secondary sources, and development of comprehension during discourse processing compared to the laboratory setting.
In order to see if there was transfer, students were asked to work with the investigator in a one-on-one read aloud in a laboratory setting. The student was asked to read a short novel, Seed People, to the investigator for parallels and congruency between interaction of narratives found in game play, and traditional print-based narratives found in the classroom.
What I noticed in talking to them about Seed People was that they would read without stopping. They would just roll right through the narrative until I would ask them to stop and tell me about what they thought was going on, with no thought of looking at the situations and events that framed each major scene, and then connecting these scenes as a coherent whole as is described earlier in the chapter as an act of effective comprehension.
In one case Stephen made interesting connections between what he saw with an older boy in the story and the struggles his brother was having in real life. I just wondered if he would have made that connection if I had not stopped at the close of that event to talk about it and make connections. This ability to chunk events and make connections, as situations change and the mental representation are updated, is important for transition points in the incremental building of a comprehensive model of a story or experience.
When working to teach reading with this information, it is important to connect to prior knowledge and build and compare the new information to prior situation models or prior experience. Consider a storyboard or a comic strip where each scene is defined and then the next event is framed. Readers need to learn to create these frames when comprehending text. Each event in a text should then be integrated and developed as an evolution of ideas presented as each scene builds with new information; the model is updated and expanded.
If the event that is currently being processed overlaps with the events in working memory on a particular dimension, then a link between those events is established, then a link between those events is stored in long-term memory. Overlap is determined based on two events sharing an index (i.e., a time, place, protagonist, cause, or goal). (Goldman, Graesser, & van den Broek, 1999, p. 94)
In this instance with Stephen, there were many opportunities for analysis with the spaces described by Hutchins. The boy made connections to family outside of the novel, to his brother, to make it meaningful and also chunk a large section of the book as an event he could relate to. There was also the description of the setting, where Stephen was not pausing or processing the narrative in his reading. The activity did not include any social learning or modeling from friends and contemporaries, but resonated the controlled formal environment of school.
Thus, it was concluded that we must build our understanding in multiple spaces. The attributes of the situation model were made much more robust and much more easily accessible when prior knowledge was recruited and connected with the familiar..
Two types of prior knowledge support this in the Event Indexing Model:
• General world knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about concept types, e.g., scripts, schemas, categories, etc.), and
• Referent specific knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about specific entities).
These two categories represent experience in the world and literary elements used in defining genre and style as described from the Event Indexing Model. The theory posits that if a reader has more experience with the world that can be tapped into, and also knowledge and experience about the structure of stories, he or she is more likely to have a deeper understanding of the passage. In the case of the game players, it was seen to be important for seeking secondary sources, as well as copying the modeled behavior of successful players like Darius and segmenting action into manageable events. This was also evident when the students were asked to read aloud print text from the Seed People novel. The students, like Stephen showed they had difficulty segmenting events, or situations, just like they had difficulty with game play.
Of the fourteen regular students in the club, only two were successful with the games. After further interview and analysis, the two successful gamers, who showed awareness of game story grammar and narrative patterns were found to lack confidence in printed text. However, they were able to leverage the narrative awareness strategies from games to leverage print text form secondary sources in order to help them successfully p;ay the games. Conversely, the twelve students who struggled had to learn the help seeking strategies and narrative awareness.
CONCLUSION
For this study, cognitive ethnography was an appropriate methodology as it allowed for observation and analysis of the social and cultural context to inform the cognitive approach taken by the game players. It improved external validity from the laboratory study by applying the same construct to a new time, place, group, and methodology. The cognitive ethnography methodology presents an opportunity to move between inductive and deductive inquiry and observation to build a Nomological network. The cognitive ethnography methodology can provide opportunity to extend laboratory findings into authentic, autonomy supporting contexts, and opportunities to understand the social and cultural behaviors that surround the activities–thus increasing generalizability. This opportunity to use hypothesis testing in an authentic setting can provide a more suitable methodology for usability and translation for other contexts like the classroom, professional development, product design, and leisure studies.
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Developmental Changes in the Visual Span for ReadingMiYoung Kwon,a Gordon E. Legge,a and Brock R. Dubbelsb
a Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elliott Hall, 75 East River Rd. Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA
b College of Education & Human Development, University of Minnesota, Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr., Minneapolis MN 55455 USA
Corresponding Author: MiYoung Kwon, 75 East River Rd, Minneapolis, MN, TEL: 612-296-6131; EMAIL:kwon0064@umn.edu
 The publisher’s final edited version of this article is available at Vision Res See other articles in PMC that cite the published article.Abstract
1. INTRODUCTION
Children’s reading speed increases throughout the school years. According toCarver (1990), from grade 2 to college, the average reading rate increases about 14 standard-length words per minute1 each year. Learning to read involves becoming proficient in phonological, linguistic and perceptual components of reading (Aghababian, & Nazir, 2000). By age 7, normally sighted children reach nearly adult levels of visual acuity (Dowdeswell, Slater, Broomhall, & Tripp, 1995). By first grade, typically 6 years of age, most of them know the alphabet. Nevertheless, reading speed takes a long time to reach adult levels.
Many studies have addressed potential explanations for developmental changes in reading skills. Because it is often assumed that visual development is complete by the beginning of grade school, most studies have focused on the role of phonological or linguistic skills in learning to read (e.g., Adams, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990;Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1997). Consistent with this focus, one widely accepted view is that linguistic skills are predictive of reading performance and serve as the locus of differences in reading ability. According to this view, skilled and less skilled readers extract the same amount of visual information during the time course of an eye fixation, but skilled readers have more rapid access to letter name codes (e.g., Jackson & McClelland, 1979; Neuhaus, Foorman, Francis, & Carlson, 2001), make better use of linguistic structure to augment the visual information (Smith, 1971), or process the information more efficiently through a memory system (Morrison, Giordani, & Nagy, 1977) (as cited in Mason, 1980, p. 97). It is further argued that inefficient eye movement control observed in less skilled readers is a reflection of linguistic processing difficulty (Rayner, 1986, 1998) rather than a symptom of perceptual difference per se.
Stanovich and colleagues have critiqued the general view that differences in reading skill are primarily due to top-down linguistic influences. See Stanovich (2000, Ch. 3) for a review. Stanovich (2000) has summarized findings showing that recognition time for isolated words is highly correlated with individual differences in reading fluency. This work has focused interest on the speed of perceptual processing, rather than top-down cognitive or linguistic influences, in accounting for individual differences in normal reading performance. The differences in word-recognition time among normally sighted subjects could be due to differences in the transformation from visual to phonological representations of words, or to differences at an earlier, purely visual, level of representation. In short, it remains plausible that individual differences in reading skill, and also the development of reading skill, are at least partially due to differences in visual processing.
Five lines of evidence implicate vision as a factor influencing reading development. 1) The characteristics of children’s reading eye movements differ from those of adults, showing smaller and less precise saccades than adults (Kowler, & Martins, 1985). 2)Mason and Katz (1976) found that good and poor readers among 6th-grade children differed in their ability to identify the relative spatial position of letters. Farkas and Smothergill (1979) also found that performance on a position encoding task improved with grade level in children in 1st, 3rd and 5th grade. 3) It was found that children’s reading ability was associated with orientation errors in letter recognition such as confusing d and b, or p and q. stressing the role of visual-orthographic skill in reading (e.g., Davidson, 1934, 1935; Cairns, & Setward, 1970; Terepocki, Kruk, & Willows, 2002). 4) More direct evidence for the involvement of visual processing in children’s reading development was obtained by O’Brien, Mansfield and Legge (2005). They observed that the critical print size for reading decreases with increasing age. (Critical print size refers to the smallest print size at which fast, fluent reading is possible.) A similar character-size dependency of reading performance was also observed by Hughes and Wilkins (2000) and Cornelissen et al. (1991). 5) Letter recognition, a necessary component process in word recognition (e.g., Pelli, Farell, & Moore, 2003), is known to be degraded by interference from neighboring letters (Bouma, 1970). This crowding effect decreases with age in school-age children (Bondarko & Semenov, 2005) and is significantly worse in children with developmental dyslexia compared with normal readers (Spinelli, De Luca, Judica, & Zoccolotti, 2002). It should also be noted that there is a related debate in the literature over the role of visual factors in dyslexia, especially the impact of visual processing in the magnocellular pathway. For competing views, see the reviews by Stein and Walsh (1997) and Skottun (2000a; 2000b).
Collectively, the empirical findings briefly summarized above suggest a role for early visual processing in the development of reading skills. The question of whether there is an early perceptual locus for reading differences is an important one to resolve both for a better understanding of the reading process and for remediation purposes. In the present paper, we ask whether vision plays a role in explaining the known developmental changes in reading speed.
Legge, Mansfield and Chung (2001) studied the relationship between reading speed and letter recognition. They proposed that the size of the visual span2 – the range of letters, formatted as in text, that can be recognized reliably without moving the eyes – covaries with reading speed. They also proposed that shrinkage of the visual span may play an important role in explaining reduced reading speed in low vision. Work in our lab has shown that for adults with normal vision, manipulation of text contrast and print size (Legge, Cheung, Yu, Chung, Lee, & Owens, 2007), character spacing (Yu, Cheung, Legge, & Chung, 2007), and retinal eccentricity (Legge, et al., 2001) produce highly correlated changes in reading speed and the size of the visual span.Pelli, Tillman, Freeman, Su, Berger, and Majaj (in press) have recently shown that a similar concept, which they term “uncrowded span,†is directly linked to reading speed. The influential role of the size of the visual span in reading speed was also demonstrated in a computational model called “Mr. Chipsâ€, which uses the size of the visual span as a key parameter (Legge, Klitz, & Tjan, 1997; Legge, Hooven, Klitz, Mansfield, & Tjan, 2002). These empirical and theoretical findings provide growing evidence for a linkage between reading speed and the size of the visual span.
We measured the visual spans of children at three grade levels to examine developmental changes in early visual processing. The size of the visual span was measured using a trigram3 (random strings of three letters) identification task (Legge, et al., 2001). In this method, participants are asked to recognize letters in trigrams flashed briefly at varying letter positions left and right of the fixation point as shown in the top panel of Figure 1. Over a block of trials, a visual-span profile is built up – a plot of letter recognition accuracy (% correct) as a function of letter position left and right of fixation – as shown in the bottom panel of Figure 1. These profiles quantify the letter information available for reading. The method of measurement means that the profiles are largely unaffected by oculomotor factors and top-down contextual factors. Trigram identification captures two major properties of visual processing required for reading: letter identification and encoding of the relative positions of letters.
We distinguish between the concept of the visual span and the concept of the perceptual span (McConkie, & Rayner, 1975). Operationally, the perceptual span refers to the region of visual field that influences eye movements and fixation times in reading. The size of the perceptual span is typically measured using either the moving window technique (McConkie, & Rayner, 1975) or moving mask technique(Rayner, & Bertera, 1979). The perceptual span is estimated to extend about 15 characters to the right of fixation and four characters to the left of fixation. Rayner (1986) argued that the perceptual span reflects readers’ linguistic processing or overall cognitive processing rather than visual processing per se. On the other hand, the visual span is relatively immune to oculomotor and top-down contextual influences, and is likely to be primarily determined by the characteristics of front-end visual processing.
Rayner (1986) measured the size of the perceptual span and characteristics of saccades and fixation times in children in second, fourth and sixth grades, and in adults. He found an increase in the size of the perceptual span and a decrease in fixation times with age. These oculomotor changes could be due to maturation in eye movement control, or to secondary factors influencing eye movement control (either bottom-up visual factors, or top-down cognitive factors). Rayner (1986) attributed the developmental changes in eye movements to top-down cognitive factors because the size of the perceptual span and fixation duration were found to be dependent on the text difficulty. For example, he found that when children in fourth grade were given age appropriate text material, their fixation times and the size of the perceptual span became close to those of adults.
To confirm that oculomotor maturation is not the major source of developmental changes in reading speed, we tested our participants with two types of reading displays. First, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) reading minimizes the need for intra-word reading saccades, and removes the reader’s control of fixation times. Second, in our Flashcard method, participants read short blocks of text requiring normal reading eye movements. If maturation of eye-movement control is an important contributor to the development of reading speed, we would expect to observe a greater developmental effect in flashcard reading compared with RSVP reading. To the extent that growth in the size of the visual span is a contributor to the development of reading speed, we would expect to find a similar positive correlation with reading speed for both types of displays.
We also asked whether letter size affects the size of the visual span. Print size in children’s books is usually larger than for adult books. The typical print size for children’s books ranges from 5 to 10 mm in x-height, equivalent to 0.72 to 1.43 deg at a viewing distance of 40 cm (Hughes & Wilkins, 2002). Hughes and Wilkins (2000)found that the reading speed of children aged 5 to 7 years decreased as the text size decreased below this range while older children aged 8 to 11 years were less dependent on letter size. O’Brien et al. (2005) reported that the critical print size (CPS) decreases with increasing age in school-age children, showing that younger children need a larger print size in order to reach their maximum reading speed than older children. The critical print size (CPS) for adults is close to 0.2° (Legge, Pelli, Rubin & Schleske, 1985; Mansfield, Legge, & Bane, 1996). It has also been observed that the size of the visual span shows the same dependence on character size as reading speed (Legge, et al., 2007). It is possible that the use of larger print in children’s books reflects the need for larger print size to maximize reading speed. In this study, we used two letter sizes −0.25°, which is slightly above the CPS of adults and 1°, which is substantially larger than the CPS. Our goal was to assess the impact of this difference on the size of the visual span and reading speed for children.
We summarize the goals of this study as follows:
First, we hypothesize that developmental changes in the size of the visual span play a role in the developmental increase in reading speed. To test this hypothesis, we measured the size of the visual span and reading speed for children at three grade levels4 (3rd, 5th and 7th) and for young adults. A testable prediction of the hypothesis is that the visual span increases in size with age and is positively correlated with reading speed.
Secondary goals were to 1) examine the effect of letter size on the development of the visual span; and 2) to assess the influence of oculomotor control with a comparison of RSVP and flashcard reading.
2. METHODS
2.1. Participants
Groups of 10 children in 3rd, 5th, and 7th grade and 10 adults (college students) participated in this study. The children were recruited from the Minneapolis public schools. They were all screened to have normal vision and to be native English speakers. Students with reading disabilities, speech problems or cognitive deficits were excluded. Cooperating teachers at the schools were asked to select students in each grade level to approximately match students for IQ and academic standing across grade levels. Ten college students were recruited from the University of Minnesota with the same criteria. For each participant, visual acuity and reading acuity were assessed with the Lighthouse Near Acuity Test and MNREAD chart respectively. Proper refractive correction for the viewing distance was made. All participants were paid $10.00 per hour. Informed consent was obtained from parents or the legal guardian in addition to the assent of children in accordance with procedures approved by the internal review board of the University of Minnesota. The mean age, visual acuity, and gender ratio for participants in the different grades are provided in Table 1.
2.2. Stimuli
Trigrams, random strings of three letters, were used to measure visual-span profiles. Letters were drawn from the 26 lowercase letters of the English alphabet (repeats were possible). By chance some of the trigrams are three-letter English words (e.g. dog, fog) which might be easier to recognize. However, the chance of getting a word trigram is less than 2% which is not likely to have much influence on the overall letter recognition accuracy (c.f. Legge et al., 2001).
All letters were rendered in a lower case Courier bold font (Apple Mac) – a serif font with fixed width and normal spacing. The letters were dark on a white background (84 cd/m2) with a contrast of about 95%. Letter size is defined as the visual angle subtended by the font’s x-height. The x-height of 0.25° and 1° character size corresponded to 6 pixels and 24 pixels. The viewing distance for all testing was 40cm. The same font was used for measuring reading speeds (see below).
The stimuli were generated and controlled using Matlab (version 5.2.1) and Psychophysics Toolbox extensions (Brainard, 1997; Pelli, 1997). They were rendered on a SONY Trinitron color graphic display (model: GDM-FW900; refresh rate: 76 Hz; resolution: 1600×1024). The display was controlled by a Power Mac G4 computer (model: M8570).
Oral reading speed was measured with two methods–Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and a static text display (Flashcard). The pool of test material consisted of 187 sentences in the original MNREAD format developed for testing reading speed by Legge, Ross, Luebker and LaMay (1989). All the sentences were 56 characters in length. In the Flashcard presentation, the sentences were formatted into four lines of 14 characters (Fig. 2.b.).
The mean word length was 3.94 letters and 93% of the 1581 unique words occur in the 2000 most frequent words based on The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide(Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995). Mean difficulty of the sentences in the pool was 4.77 (Gunning’s Fog Index), and 1.34 (Flesh-Kincaid Index). According toCarver’s (1976) formula5, the mean difficulty level is below 2nd grade level. Allowing for differences in these metrics, the difficulty of the sentences is roughly 2nd to 4thgrade level. Sample sentences are presented in Figure 2.c. We divided the sentence pool into three sub-pools so that there were separate, non-overlapping sets of sentences for RSVP, Flashcard, and practice. Sentences were selected randomly without replacement, so that no subject saw the same sentence more than once during testing.
2.3. Measuring Visual-Span Profiles
Visual-span profiles were measured using a letter recognition task, as described in the Introduction. Trigrams were presented with their middle letter at 11 letter positions, including 0 (the letter position at fixation) and from 1 to 5 letter widths left and right of the 0 position. Trigram position was indexed by the middle letter of the trigram. For instance, a trigram abc at the position +3 had the b located in position 3 to the right of the 0 letter position, and a trigram at position −3 had its middle letter three letter positions to the left.
Each of the 11 trigram positions was tested 10 times, in a random order, within a block of 110 trials. The task of the participant was to report the three letters from left to right. A letter was scored as being identified correctly only if its order within the trigram was also correct. Feedback was not provided to the participants about whether or not their responses were correct.
Participants were instructed to fixate between two vertically separated fixation points (Fig. 1) on the computer screen during trials. Since there was no way of predicting on which side of fixation the trigram would appear, and the exposure time was too brief to permit useful eye movements, the participants understood that there was no advantage to deviate from the intended fixation. All participants had practice trials in the trigram test, RSVP test and Flashcard test prior to data collection. Participants were verbally encouraged to fixate carefully between the dots at the beginning of a trial.
Proportion correct recognition was measured at each of the letter slots and combined across the trigram trials in which the letter slot was occupied by the outer (the furthest letter from fixation), middle, or inner (the one closest to fixation) letter of a trigram. This means that although trigrams were centered at a given position only 10 times in a block, data from that position were based on 30 trials. As described in the Introduction, a visual span profile consists of percent correct letter recognition as a function of position left and right of fixation. These profiles are fit with “split Gaussiansâ€, that is, Gaussian curves that are characterized with amplitude (the peak value at letter position 0), and the left and right standard deviations (the breadth of the curve). These profiles usually peak at the midline and decline in the left and right visual fields. The profiles are often slightly broader on the right of the peak (Legge et al., 2001).
As described in the Introduction and illustrated in Figure 1 (i.e., the right vertical scale), percent correct letter recognition can be linearly transformed to information transmitted in bits. The information values range from 0 bits for chance accuracy of 3.8% correct (the probability of correctly guessing one of 26 letters) to 4.7 bits for 100% accuracy (Legge et al., 2001)6. The size of the visual span is quantified by summing across the information transmitted in each slot (similar to computing the area under the visual-span profile). Lower and narrower visual span profiles transmit fewer bits of information. In the Results, the size of the visual span will be quantified in units of bits of information transmitted.
Visual-span profiles were measured for each participant at two letter sizes (0.25° and 1°). In both cases, the stimulus exposure time was 100ms. The order of the two conditions was interleaved both within participants and across participants (e.g. participant A started with 1° letter size while participant B started with 0.25° letter size, and so on).
2.4. Measuring Reading Speed
Oral reading speed was measured with two testing methods: Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and static text (Flashcard method). For both testing conditions, the method of constant stimuli was used to present sentences at five exposure times in logarithmically spaced steps, spanning ~ 0.7 log units. For both reading speed tasks, the two letter size conditions were interleaved. The testing session was preceded by a practice session. During this session, the range of exposure times for each participant was chosen in order to make sure that at least 80% correct response (percent of words correct in a sentence) was obtained at the longest exposure time.
For RSVP, the sentences were presented sequentially one word at a time at the same screen location (i.e., the first letter of each word occurred at the same screen location). There was no blank frame (inter-stimulus interval) between words. Each sentence was preceded and followed by strings of x’s as shown in Figure 2.a. In the Flashcard reading test, an entire sentence was presented on the screen as shown inFigure 2.b.
For both tasks, participants initiated each trial by pressing a key. They were instructed to read the sentences aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. Participants were allowed to complete their verbal response at their own speed, not under time pressure. A word was scored as correct, even if given out of order, e.g., a correction at the end of a sentence, the number of words read correctly per sentence was recorded. Five sentences were tested for each exposure time and percent correct word recognition was computed at each exposure time.
Psychometric functions, percent correct versus log RSVP or log Flashcard exposure times, were created by fitting these data with cumulative Gaussian functions (Wichmann, & Hill, 2001a) as shown in Figure 3. The four panels represent four sets of data from RSVP and Flashcard tasks at two letter sizes. Five data points in each panel represent percent words correct in a sentence for RSVP and for Flashcard. The threshold exposure time, for words of a given length was based on the 80% correct point on the psychometric function. For example, in RSVP, if an exposure time of 200 msec per word yielded 80% correct, the reading rate was 5 words per second, equals to 300 wpm. For Flashcard, if the exposure time was 2 sec and the participant read 8 words correctly out of ten, the corresponding reading speed was 4 words per second, equals to 240 wpm.
3. RESULTS
Three dependent variables were measured: the size of the visual span, RSVP reading speed and flashcard reading speed. We conducted one ANOVA test for each measure. The grade level (3rd, 5th, 7th, and Adult) was treated as a categorical variable rather than numerical variable for the statistical analysis.
A 4 (grade) × 2 (letter size) repeated measures ANOVA with grade as a between-subject factor and letter size as a within-subject factor was tested on the size of the visual span. There was a significant main effect of grade level on the size of the visual span (F(3,36) = 9.54, p < 0.001). There was a significant interaction effect between grade level and letter size (F(3,36) = 3.46, p = 0.02). But no significant main effect of letter size on the size of the visual span was found.
A 4 (grade) × 2 (letter size) repeated measures ANOVA with grade as a between-subject factor and letter size as a within-subject factor was tested on RSVP and flashcard reading speeds separately. There was a main effect of grade level on RSVP reading speed (F(3, 36) = 7.80, p < 0.001) and Flashcard reading speed (F(3, 36) = 9.35, p < 0.001). No significant letter size effects on reading speed were found.
The effect of grade level on the size of the visual span and reading speed
The 4 × 2 repeated measure ANOVA test showed that there was a significant main effect of grade on the size of the visual span (η2 = 0.44, p < 0.01). A pairwise contrast test also showed that there were significant differences in the size of the visual span among all pairs of grades except between 3rd and 5th grades. The mean size of the visual span averaged across two letter sizes for the 10 participants is plotted for each grade in Figure 4. These results show that the visual span grows in size from 3rd grade (mean = 34.28 ± 1.17 bits) to adults (mean = 41.66 ± 0.87 bits). The effect size (using Cohen’s d) of the difference in the size of the visual span between 3rd grade and adults equals to 2.28.
We also found that there was a significant main effect of grade level on both RSVP (η2 = 0.39, p < 0.01) and Flashcard (η2 = 0.44, p < 0.01) reading speeds. Figure 5shows RSVP (left panel) and Flashcard (right panel) reading speeds (wpm) as a function of grade level. Open circles in both panels represent reading speeds for 1° letters, and the closed circles for 0.25° letters. Each data point represents the mean reading speed averaged across two letter sizes for a single participant.
As shown in Figure 5, there was a linear increase in both RSVP and flashcard reading speeds with grade level. As expected from prior research, RSVP reading speed was faster than Flashcard reading speed for all groups by an average factor of 1.58, which is fairly consistent with the results (i.e. a factor of 1.44) for a similar comparison by Yu et al. (2007). The growth in RSVP reading speed across grades exceeds the growth in flashcard reading speed, confirming the view that maturation of the oculomotor system is not a major factor associated with the growth in children’s reading speed.
The increment in flashcard reading speed per grade was consistent with earlier studies of page reading speed (Taylor, 1965; Carver, 1990; Tressoldi, Stella, & Faggella, 2001). Carver (1990) estimated that the growth in reading speed was 14 standard-length words per minute per grade level (where one standard-length word is equivalent to 6 characters). The average increment for Flashcard reading speed in our study was approximately 18 words per minute each year and its transformed value into Carver’s metric is 14 wpm, equal to Carver’s estimate.
Relationship between the size of the visual span and reading speed
Flashcard and RSVP reading speeds are plotted against the size of the visual span for our forty participants in Figures 6 and ​and77 respectively. The closed circles, open circles, closed squares, and open squares show data for 3rd, 5th, 7th grade, and adults respectively. The best-fitting lines for predicting reading speed from the size of the visual span are also shown.
There were significant correlations between the size of the visual span and Flashcard reading speed (r = 0.72, p < 0.01), and RSVP reading speed (r = 0.58, p = 0.01).
From the regression model for flashcard reading (Fig. 6), 52% of the variability of the reading speed can be accounted for by the size of the visual span (r2 = 0.52, p < 0.01). The slope of the regression line indicates that an increase in the size of the visual span by 1 bit brings about an increase in reading speed by 22 wpm. The effect size (Cohen’s d) is 2.29 for the difference in flashcard reading speed between 3rd graders and adults. Similarly, from the regression model for RSVP reading (Fig. 7), 33% of the variability of the reading speed can be accounted for by the size of the visual span (r2 = 0.34, p < 0.01). The slope of the regression line indicates that an increase in the size of the visual span by 1 bit brings about an increase in reading speed by 28 wpm. The effect size (Cohen’s d) is once again 2.29 for the difference in RSVP reading speed between 3rd graders and adults.
As described in the Methods section, reading speed was derived from the stimulus exposure time yielding 80% correct word recognition. To determine if the results were sensitive to this criterion, we reanalyzed the data with 70% and 90% criteria for defining reading speed. We found that the relationship between reading speed and the size of the visual span was not criterion dependent – correlations between size of the visual span and reading speed remained approximately the same across all three criteria (less than 0.01 differences in correlations).
The effects of letter size on the visual span and reading speed
We did not find a significant main effect of letter size on either the visual span or reading speeds in children. Contrary to the possibility raised in the Introduction, it does not appear that the use of larger print size in children’s books can be explained in terms of optimizing the size of the visual span.
While children in all three grade levels showed no dependence of letter size on the size of the visual span, adults showed slightly larger visual spans for 0.25° letters than for 1° letters (~ 3 bits). Legge et al. (2007) studied the effect of character size on the size of the visual span for a group of five young adults. They did not find a significant difference in the size of the visual span between 0.25° and 1°. We are unsure of the reason for the small discrepancy in the two studies.
4. DISCUSSION
Relationship between reading speed and the size of the visual span
It is obvious that visual processing is critical to print reading. It is not so obvious that individual differences in reading speed are linked to differences in visual processing nor that developmental changes in reading speed are influenced by visual factors. We have taken the theoretical position that front-end visual processing influences letter recognition which in turn influences reading speed. We have measured letter recognition in the form of visual-span profiles. The shape and size of these profiles are largely immune to top-down contextual factors and to oculomotor factors, and represent the bottom-up sensory information available to letter recognition and reading. The size of these profiles has been previously linked empirically and theoretically to reading speed (Legge, Mansfield & Chung, 2001;Â Legge et al., 2007). More specifically, it is hypothesized that the size of the visual span is an important determinant of reading speed.
As reviewed in the Introduction, it is known that children’s reading speed gradually increases throughout the school years (cf., Carver, 1990). The principal goal of our study was to determine whether visual development has an impact on this improvement in reading speed. We addressed this question by measuring changes in the size of the visual span across grade levels. Our hypothesis was that the size of the visual span would increase with grade level, and exhibit a correlation with reading speed.
These predictions were confirmed by our results. We found that there was a developmental growth in the size of the visual span from 3rd grade to adulthood paralleling growth in reading speed. A statistically significant 34% to 52% of the variance in reading speed could be accounted for by the size of the visual span.
Why does a larger visual span facilitate faster reading? For eye-movement mediated reading of lines of text on a page or screen (such as the flashcards in the present study), a larger visual span means that more letters can be recognized accurately on each fixation. With a larger visual span, longer words might be recognized on one fixation, or more letters of an adjacent word might be recognized if the fixated word is short (parafoveal preview). The effects of changing the size of the visual span were explored using an ideal-observer model, called Mr. Chips, by Legge, Klitz and Tjan (1997). Because a larger visual span means that more letters are recognized, the reader is able to make larger saccades; the greater mean saccade length facilitates faster reading. In the case of RSVP reading, there is no need for intra-word saccades or parafoveal preview of the leading letters of the next word. Only one word is visible at a time. In this case, we might speculate that the visual span need only be large enough to accommodate mean word length of the text (3.94 letters in the present study) or possibly the longest word in the text (8 letters in our text). If so, we might expect a weaker effect of visual-span size on RSVP reading speed, and possibly a ceiling once the visual span exceeded some critical value. These effects are not evident in the present data. Growth of the visual span manifests as both an increase in the breadth of visual-span profiles and also an increase in the height of the profiles, i.e., increasing letter-recognition accuracy in the central portion of the profile. The increased height of the profile could contribute to faster and more accurate recognition, even of relatively short strings. In other words, the graded form of the visual-span profile, and its potential growth in both height and breadth, can contribute to faster reading for both flashcard and RSVP text.
We recognize that our results are correlational in nature. It is possible that independent factors could drive the developmental changes in reading speed and size of the visual span. Although a causal link between the size of the visual span and reading speed remains to be proven, stronger evidence for a causal link has been provided by Legge, Cheung, Yu, Chung, Lee & Owens, 2007). These authors have amassed convergent data from several experiments on adults showing that the size of the visual span and reading speed vary in a highly correlated way in response to changes in stimulus parameters such as contrast and character size. For example, it is known that the dependence of reading speed on character size exhibits a nonmonotonic relationship in which reading speed has a maximum value for a range of intermediate character sizes, and decreases for larger and smaller character sizes. Legge et al. (2007) showed that the size of the visual span has the same nonmonotonic dependence on character size.
Sensory factors affecting the size of the visual span
What sensory factors might contribute to developmental changes in the size of the visual span? In the Introduction, we mentioned three candidate factors—errors in the relative position of letters in strings, orientation errors such as confusing b with d, and effects of crowding. We briefly comment on additional analyses of our visual-span data to address the roles of these factors.
Errors in relative spatial position (e.g., reporting bqx when the stimulus was qbx), sometimes termed mislocation errors, were evaluated by scoring trigram letter recognition in two ways; by demanding correct relative position for a letter to be correct, or by the more lenient criterion of scoring a letter correct if reported anywhere in the trigram string. The difference in percent correct by these two scoring methods is a measure of the rate of mislocation errors. An one-way ANOVA with grade (3rd, 5th, 7th, and Adult) as a between-subject factor revealed a significant main effect of grade on the rate of mislocation errors (F(3, 36) = 4.55, p < 0.01). The rate of mislocation errors increased with decreasing grade level (mean error rate for 3rd grade = 8.43 ± 1.1% and the mean error rate for adults = 4.25 ± 0.5%). Mislocation errors could be cognitive in origin, resulting from verbal-reporting mistakes, or visual in origin, resulting from imprecise coding of visual position. We think the latter is more likely because we found that the rate of mislocation errors was dependent on visual-field location, increasing at greater distances from fixation. This dependency of mislocation errors on letter position was consistent across all age groups.
We assessed orientation errors by measuring b and d confusions, and also p and qconfusions. Orientation errors are defined when b (or p) is reported instead of d (or p) and vice versa. The number of incorrect responses out of the total number of occurrence of b, p, d, and q is a measure of the rate of orientation errors. An one-way ANOVA with grade as a between-subject factor revealed a significant main effect of grade on the rate of orientation errors (F(3, 36) = 4.98, p < 0.01). Orientation errors decreased with increasing grade level (mean error rate for 3rd grade = 5.85 ± 0.40% vs. mean error rate for adults = 3.79 ± 0.38%). Since these children and adults would typically have no difficulty in distinguishing b from d, or p from q, in an untimed test of isolated letter recognition, we expect that these confusions result from the temporal demands of the trigram task or from adjacency of flanking letters (crowding) and have an impact on the size of the visual span.
In a separate preliminary report, based on this data set, we have shown that a decrease in crowding accounts for at least a portion of the growth in the size of visual span profiles across grade levels (Kwon & Legge, 2006). Pelli et al. (in press)have recently presented compelling theoretical and empirical arguments for the important role of crowding in limiting the size of the visual span (they use the term “uncrowded spanâ€), although they did not address developmental changes in the size of the visual span.
In short, relative position errors, orientation errors and crowding may all play a role in developmental changes in the size of the visual span.
Oculomotor factors
It is also possible that fixation errors could play a role in the observed developmental changes in the size of the visual span. Indeed, it has been reported that children’s fixation stability increases with age from 4 to 15 years (Ygge, et al, 2005). If children erroneously fixated leftward or rightward of the intended location in our trigram task, performance would on average, suffer; the mean distance of trigrams from the fixation point would increase as the size of the fixational error increases. We conducted a simulation analysis to evaluate the impact on the size of the visual span of such fixation errors. The key parameter of the model was the variability in fixation positions, represented by the standard deviation of an assumed Gaussian distribution of fixation locations centered on the correct fixation mark. An average adult visual span was used as an input parameter for each Bernoulli trial to obtain proportion correct for each letter position. Over trials, we computed the size of the visual span in bits of information transmitted. Through 100 repetitions, we obtained the estimates of the size of the visual span for a given fixation error. For example, if the standard deviation was two letter positions (σ = 2), 68% of the fixation points in the simulated trials would lie within ±2 letter positions from the intended fixation mark. As expected the greater the fixation errors (i.e., larger standard deviations), the smaller the size of the resulting visual spans. The simulation results indicated that fixation variability would need to increase from a standard deviation of 0 to more than 3 letter positions to simulate our observed reduction in visual span size from adults to 3rd graders. Moreover, fixation errors of 3 letter spaces for 1° letters would correspond to fixation errors of 12 letter spaces for 0.25° letters, producing devastating effects on the size of the visual span for the smaller print size. Because we did not observe print size effects on the size of the visual span, and because the fixation errors deduced from our simulation seem implausibly large, we doubt that fixation errors account for the developmental differences in the size of the visual span.
We also observed a substantial growth in reading speed across grades even in the RSVP reading where the need for eye movements is minimized. This result also confirms the view that developmental changes in reading speed can not be solely explained by maturation of oculomotor control.
Non-visual factors
Although we have focused on the size of the visual span as a possible factor influencing reading development, our data indicate that this factor accounts for at most 30 to 50% of the variance in reading speeds across grade levels. Non-visual cognitive and linguistic factors must also contribute to developmental changes in reading speed. It is possible that accidental correlations of one of these factors with grade level could masquerade as an effect of visual span. For example, if reading speed is correlated with IQ, and some unknown selection bias resulted in increasing mean IQ across grade level, then IQ might underlie the correlations we found between reading speed and visual span. In the case of IQ, this seems highly unlikely. Although we did not control for or measure the IQ of our subjects, we have no reason to suspect that there were increases in IQ across grade levels. Even if such a sampling bias exists, O’Brien et al. (2005) found no effect of IQ on maximum oral reading speed and critical print size in a group of children (aged 6 to 8) tested with MNREAD sentences similar to those used in the present study.
As another example, it is possible that children’s ability to recognize and speak the words used in our testing material varied across grade levels, accounting for the correlation between reading speed and grade level. For example, if children in the lower grades were unable to recognize and articulate words in the test material, even for unlimited viewing time, the missed words would count as errors in our scoring and result in reduced reading speed. We did not test word decoding skills of our subjects on a standardized test such as the subsets of the Woodcock-Johnson III Cognitive and Achievement Batteries (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). We did, however, screen all of our subjects with the MNREAD acuity chart (for a review of its properties, see Mansfiel & Legge, 2007). This chart, although designed as a test of the effect of visual factors on maximum reading speed, critical print size and reading acuity, uses simple declarative sentences with vocabulary consisting of the 2,000 most frequent words in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade text. The sentence material on the MNREAD chart is very similar to the test material in the present study. None of the words was missed or read incorrectly by our children for sentences above their critical print sizes. These observations lead us to conclude that untimed word-decoding skill was not a limiting factor influencing performance across grade levels in our study.
As yet another example of a potential non-visual influence, the oral reporting method used in the trigram task for measuring visual-span profiles might reflect more than the ability to extract visual information. Performance in this task could be influenced by articulation programming, rapid access to letter naming, memory capacity, and reporting accuracy. Many studies using rapid automatized letter naming (RAN) have shown that those component skills are highly correlated with reading performance (e.g., Denckla & Rudel, 1976; Wolf, 1991; Wolf, Bally, & Morris, 1986; Manis, Seidenberg, & Doi, 1999). It is possible that the underlying visual spans are actually stable across school age, but the observed changes in the size of visual-span profiles might be due to some later stages of processing. However, we think this is unlikely. In the trigram task, there was no time pressure to report the letters, so there were no requirements for rapid articulation and no time pressure on access to letter naming codes. It is still possible that younger children might make more phonological errors or transposition errors in reporting due to less efficient memory. Indeed, it is known that overall memory capacity including perceptual-memory improves with increasing age in children (Dempster, 1978; Shwantes, 1979; Ross-sheehy, Oakes, & Luck, 2003). However, convergent evidence has shown that children at the age of 9 are able to hold an average 5 to 6 digits or spatial symbols in their visual memory (e.g., Wilson, Scott, & Power, 1987; Miles, Morgan, Milne, & Morris, 1996). This result suggests that recalling and reporting a triplet of letters is not likely to pose difficulties for the children in our study. Manis et al. (1999) had 1st and 2nd grade students name 50 digits and letters in a random order aloud as rapidly as possible and measured reporting accuracy. They found that the rate of oral reporting errors was less than 2%, suggesting that by the end of first grade, most children know the names of all the letters and are able to report them with high accuracy.
These considerations encourage us to believe that the observed differences in the size of the visual span across age is likely to represent changes in the availability of bottom-up sensory information rather than effects of later stages of processing. Nevertheless, we cannot rule out the possibility that some other uncontrolled cognitive or other non-visual variable accounted for the apparent association between visual span and reading speed across grade levels in our study.
Effect of letter size
Finally, we addressed the effect of letter size. We expected that young children would have larger visual spans and read faster with 1° characters than with 0.25° characters. Contrary to our expectation, we found no effect of character size for either reading speed or visual span in children. Apparently, legibility as assessed by these two measures, does not account for the preference of children for larger print in books. It is possible that developmental changes in the effects of print size on reading speed are complete by 3rd grade (age 8–9 years), accounting for the absence of print size effects in our data. Consistent with this possibility, Wilkins and Hughes (2002) found that younger children aged below 7 showed a significant dependence of reading speed on letter size in the range 0.72 to 1.43 deg at a viewing distance of 40 cm, but older children above 8 years did not. Similarly, O’Brien et al. (2005) showed that critical print size (CPS) decreased with age from 6 to 8 years old, suggesting younger children need larger print to optimize reading performance. Taken together, it may be the case that the dependence of reading speed on print size becomes adult-like by about 8 years of age.
Summary
We summarize our conclusions as follows: 1) The visual span grows in size during the school years. 2) Consistent with the visual-span hypothesis this developmental change in the size of the visual span is significantly correlated with the developmental increase in reading speed. 3) Because both RSVP and flashcard reading speed increase with age, the growth in reading speed is unlikely to be due to oculomotor maturation. 4) We found no evidence that the use of larger print in children’s books reflects faster reading or larger visual spans for large print.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to students and teachers of the Minneapolis Public Schools for their participation in this study. We thank Beth O’Brien for her helpful advice on the earlier draft of this manuscript. We are also thankful to Sing-Hang Cheung for his help with the design of experiments. We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by NIH grant R01 EY02934.
Footnotes
1Carver (1977) defined six characters in text (including spaces and punctuation) as one “standard-length word.†Measuring reading speed in standard-length words per minute is a character-based metric. Carver (1990) argued for the advantage of this metric over the common “words per minute†metric for measuring reading speed.
2The term ‘visual span’ was introduced by O’Regan (O’Regan, Levy-Schoen & Jacobs, 1983; O’Regan, 1990,1991). He defined the visual span as the region around the point of fixation within which characters of a given size can be resolved. Empirical studies have shown that normally sighted adults have a visual span of 7–11 letters. For a review, see Legge (2007, Ch. 3).
3Trigrams were used rather than isolated letters because of their closer approximation to English text. Text contains strings of letters. Most letter recognition in text involves characters flanked on the left, right or both sides.
4In this article, school grade levels refer to the American system. The correspondence between grade level and age is as follows: 1st grade (6–7 yrs), 2nd grade (7–8 yrs), 3rd grade (8–9 yrs), 4th grade (9–10 yrs), 5th grade (10–11 yrs), 6th grade (11–12 yrs), 7th grade (12–13 yrs), and 8th grade (13–14 yrs).
5We estimated the grade level from Carver (1976) who expressed the relationship between characters per word (cpw) and difficulty level (DL). According to his formula, the number of characters per word for 1st grade difficulty is approximately 5 cpw including a trailing space after each word, which is slightly above the number of characters per word (4.7 cpw) we used for our reading tasks.
6Percent correct letter recognition was converted to bits of information using letter-confusion matrices byBeckmann (1998).
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References
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Teachers and teacher evaluation may be directly related to a construct from social psychology called Stereotype Threat and the relationship between motivation and teacher professional identities.
Stereotype Threat
Stereotype threat is the fear that we may confirm a negative stereotype about a group we belong to. From the wikipedia, we can read some of the history of the socio-cognitive construct:
In the early 1990s, Claude Steele, in collaboration with Joshua Aronson, performed the first experiments demonstrating that stereotype threat can undermine intellectual performance. . . Overall, findings suggest that stereotype threat may occur in any situation where an individual faces the potential of confirming a negative stereotype. For example, stereotype threat can negatively affect the performance of European Americans in athletic situations[11] as well as men who are being tested on their social sensitivity.[12] The experience of stereotype threat can shift depending on which group identity is salient to the situation. For example, Asian-American women are subject to a gender stereotype that expects them to be poor at mathematics, and a racial stereotype that expects them to do particularly well. Subjects from this group performed better on a math test when their racial identity was made salient; and worse when their gender identity was made salient.[13]
In another description of stereotype threat, Open Education describes that a recent study by researchers at the University of Colorado reveals that the issue of stereotype threat in the sciences is very real for young women. The study also reveals that educators can take some very simple steps to help reduce the impact of stereotype threat in the classroom.Certain individuals appear to be more likely to experience stereotype threat than others. Individuals who are highly identified with a particular domain appear to be more vulnerable to experiencing stereotype threat. Therefore, students who are highly identified with doing well in school may, ironically, be more likely to underperform when under stereotype threat. A key feature of this phenomena was highlighted by Amanda Schaefer at Slate Magazine. In order to counter stereotype threat, individuals need to experience positive development and build confidence over the course of a semester. Schaefer explains that a slightly better performance on test one leads to greater motivation and thus leads some individuals to work harder. That work then transcends to understanding of the material that then leads to greater confidence and even further motivation.
Teachers and Stereotype Threat
A recent study by the MeLife Foundation identified that teacher morale is at an all time low. This was discussed recently by the New York Times and a blog at Education Week. It would seem that teachers may be in a no-win situation. They are scrutinized for performance, often evaluated by administrators and others who may not be qualified to evaluate teacher performance. When faced with an evaluation, teachers may face serious professional and personal consequences when they do not satisfy criteria in the evaluation rubric, as interpreted by the evaluators. This was very nicely described in an opinion piece at the NY Times, called, Confessions of a Bad Teacher. In this article, the author writes:
I was confused. Earlier last year, this same assistant principal observed me and instructed me to prioritize improving my “assertive voice†in the classroom. But about a month later, my principal observed me and told me to focus entirely on lesson planning, since she had no concerns about my classroom management. A few weeks earlier, she had written on my behalf for a citywide award for “classroom excellence.†Was I really a bad teacher?
In my three years with the city schools, I’ve seen a teacher with 10 years of experience become convinced, after just a few observations, that he was a terrible teacher. A few months later, he quit teaching altogether. I collaborated with another teacher who sought psychiatric care for insomnia after a particularly intense round of observations. I myself transferred to a new school after being rated “unsatisfactory.â€
My belief is that if we are to avoid such things as stereotype threat in evaluating teachers, good administrators use the evaluation processes to support teachers and help them avoid those painful classroom moments — not to weed out the teachers who don’t produce good test scores or adhere to their pedagogical beliefs (Johnson, 2012).
The current culture of teacher quality and evaluation may be leading to issues in how teachers view their professional identities. They may be living two different professional lives–what they believe to work, and what they have to do to make the grade. This may be especially true with innovative teachers, who have to keep their heads down and teach in a way that works for them and leads to results. After I achieving, their  methods may be accepted. This comes from professional pride and ability. The question that must be asked is whether these innovators and creative teachers can document and demonstrate data-driven instruction.  This kind of instruction may not be applicable to generalized teacher quality assessments, because what the teacher is doing is not generally what is seen.  Is it possible an evaluator who is given a rubric is able or capable of making this evident after reviewing the teacher for  55 minutes they spent checking off cells on a rubric-driven evaluation?
The Jekyll and Hyde Effect
In the Jeckyll and Hyde Effect (Dubbels, 2009), teachers reported themselves in a situation where they had begun creating two different classrooms, two different sets of grade books, and two different teaching identities – culminating in the classroom they show, and the classroom they grow. These teachers had created a duality in professional identity, meaning that they had created different classrooms and identities to fit the expectations of the mandates, district mentors on learning walks, district trainings, and Professional Development Planning, so they could work “under the radar†and “not be hassled.â€
This phenomena seems to accompany most trends of educational reform.  In an article by Lasky (2005), it was posited that we may be destroying the professional identities of teachers by attacking their styles and beliefs about teaching and learning, and perhaps most importantly, their willingness to be vulnerable to reach kids and connect. Teachers expressed that they felt tension as professional educators, and that their beliefs about student learning often contrasted the current beliefs related to the culture of accountability.
According to Lasky (2005), this is not uncommon. In this passage (pg. 905) Lasky quotes and describes a veteran teacher considering leaving the profession because of frustration with “ladder climbersâ€:
Now there are lot of people who think this is a job to go to because the vacations are good, they follow the doctrines, and a lot of good people are leaving. The major message I was receiving was that you could make a difference, and we’re in this together, and it’s up to all of us to make the world a better place, you know, find your niche and dig in. And it was almost your job to do the peace and love thing. But the message now is that there’s no one to take care of you, you’ve got to watch your back, which is sad.
This teacher’s identity and sense of agency were in tension with the changing political landscape of reform. She found that she was not able to trust these people who were not willing to take the ‘‘real risks’’ entailed in teaching. One such risk is expressing one’s vulnerability;  such as knowing and standing up for one’s beliefs, connecting with students and doing all that can be done to help students from failing.
This can lead to a real hindrance in organizational and institutional trust, especially when it comes time for professional development activities that might require learning.  Teachers reported that they had seen “outcomes based education, constructivism, and profiles of learning†come and go. They reported that they had already invested a huge amount of time into these curricular approaches earlier in their careers, and were not willing to invest as heavily now that they had curriculum that worked for them. One teacher spoke of, “ I used to spend my weekends, afternoons, and evenings calling parents and correcting all for a .6 (part-time) placement, and I decided that I was working harder than the students and parents and not getting paid for it.†This teacher’s feeling was repeated throughout interviews with experienced teachers who shared that they had found an approach that they liked and allowed them to have lives outside of the classroom.
Identity and motivation
According to Dubbels (2009), formal learning seems to necessitate trust and identity. For Deci and Ryan (2002) the focus comes from work on motivation of basic psychological needs, with a focus on Autonomy — possibly built from early work by White (1959), where organisms have an innate need to experience competence and agency, and experience joy and pleasure with the new behaviors when they assert competence over the environment . . . what White called effectance motivation. If the individual gets social reinforcement and improved status in a relationship or community, they will be more likely be motivated to engage, and sustain that engagement, (Dubbels, 2009).
In order for a teacher to remain engaged in their profession and care about what is happening, and to sustain engagement , “motivation must be internalized†the teacher needs to identify the value of the behavior with other values that are part of themselves (Dubbels, 2009).  This internalization is recognized by others, and can be rewarded, ignored, or punished by the professional community, the students and parents, and administration and mentors for professional development. The same factors that we ask teachers to take into account for their classroom students are also at play in developing teacher professional development. This process of change includes public acknowledgement and awareness of making personal and professional change, and this public behavior can expose the individual to being vulnerable to the perceptions and judgment of others.
When a serious game is commissioned, it is expected that in-game learning should transfer to the work place or a clinical setting, not just lead to improvements in game play.
Evidence of transfer should be a priority in serious game development; there should be evidence that learning acquired in a game is applicable outside of the game.
The Vegas Effect is not unique to games; however, serious games will need to provide evidence that learning that happens in games, does not stay in games.
The tradition of psychometrics may provide methods for data collection and analysis so that serious games may eventually serve as empirically validated diagnostic tools and measures of learning—applicable inside and outside of the game. With tools for measuring training effectiveness from psychometrics, ROI analysis of training solutions and clinical tools can be conducted, and the risk associated with the costs of game development may be diminished.
Serious games and assessment
Serious games are very much like the tools used in psychological assessments and evaluations. Three types of assessments from psychometric methods:
- Formative assessments –a measurement tool used to measure growth and progress in learning and activity and can be used in games to alter subsequent learning experiences in games. Formative assessments represent a tool external to the learning activity, and typically occur in leading up to a summative evaluation.
- Summative assessments provide an evaluation or a final summarization of learning. Summative assessment is characterized as assessment of learning and is contrasted with formative assessment, which is assessment for learning. Summative assessments are also tools external to the learning activity, and typically occur at the end of the learning intervention to evaluate and summarize and is conducted with a tool that is external, not part of the training.
- An informative assessment guides and facilitates learning as part of the assessment. The assessment is the intervention. Successful participation in the learning results in evidence that learning has taken place. The behaviors in the activity have been shown to verify that learning has taken place. No external measures have been added on for assessment.
Games are typically used in the definition of what is an informative assessment. This makes sense, as a game, by its very nature, provides an activity along with assessments, measures, and evaluation. What, why, and how a game measures learning is of primary importance—and this is why serious game designers must learn assessment methods from the field of psychometrics if serious games are to grow as diagnostic tools, assessments, and evaluations.
If a game is to act as an informative assessment, it will stress meaningful, timely, and continuous feedback about learning concepts and process that are accurately depicted. As in an informative assessment, feedback in a game can be a powerful part of the assessment process. As the learner acts in the context of the games rule environment, they may learn the rules and tools through trial and error—eventually developing tactical approaches, and potentially formulate strategies from the possibilities for action deduced from learning from the in-game assessment criteria. This can be powerful.
Evidence supports this powerful learning tool. Research findings from over 4,000 studies indicate that informative assessment has the most significant impact on achievement (Wiliam, 2007). When serious games are built with same care as an informative assessment using methods from psychometrics, serious games can be as effective as an informative assessment.
Currently, most games are not designed as informative assessments. This means that learning in a serious game might suffer from the Vegas Effect. For a game to act as informative assessment, the game must accurately measure the learning the concepts, and the concepts from the game must transfer to other performance contexts—beyond the game. In order to achieve this, the issue of construct validity must be addressed.
For a serious game to have construct validity, the training interventions that they present must have been designed with emphasis on the creation of internal and external validity—what we model, how we measure it, and how it is presented in a game:
- External validity: the ability to generalize in-game learning to other contexts.  To what extent can a training effect from a game be generalized to other populations (population validity), other settings (ecological validity), other treatment variables, and other measurement variables?
- Internal validity: examines whether the adequacy of the study design, or in this case of the game, that the intervention was the only possible cause of a change in the players learning.
To do this, serious game development requires valid concepts for modeling, implementation, and assessment of what is to be learned, as well as how it will be measured outside the game. This is essential for ROI (return on investment) analysis. Serious game development requires research and construct validity to conduct ROI and to avoid the Vegas Effect. Learning that happens in games should not stay in games.
Leaving Las Vegas:
I have come across few if any games that have been designed with the kind of careful attention to research methodology that would be expected when measuring learning, intelligence, personality, or depression. Methods that ensure construct validity are expected in the field of psychometrics and the learning sciences, and may soon emerge as standard practice in serious game design.
Games are often designed to have surface validity. This means that the game APPEARS to measure what it is supposed to measure. Surface level validity is a useful beginning, but should only be considered a step towards having a valid assessment. It should be considered a gamble to build a serious game on surface validity. Designing a serious game on surface validity increases the likelihood of the Vegas Effect.
To reduce the likelihood of the Vegas Effect, a serious game designer could take their game and correlate learning outcomes with validated tools external to the serious game, such as formative and summative assessments. This method of validation is called criterion validity. To do this, the game designer might correlate success in the game with other diagnostic measures with verified content validity. For example, a claim may be made that a game improves working memory. This claim may be validated using the Dual N-Back Test for measures of working memory. The game designer might choose to have a sample of individuals take the Dual N-Back Task, play the game, and then use the Dual N-Back Task after the serious game to measure changes in working memory using the Dual N-Back Task as criterion for measuring changes in working memory.
Criterion validity is a powerful way to claim effectiveness, and reduce the likelihood of a Vegas Effect. However, the research design is essential in using criterion validity. One cannot simply have someone play their serious game and then attribute changes in the Dual N-Back score by correlation with having played the serious game . . . correlation does not imply causation. To validate the serious game with improvements in working memory on the Dual N-Back Task, the serious game developer should recruit methods from psychometrics such as a Repeated Measures Design, with attention to Sampling.
To really avoid the Vegas Effect, the serious game developer should adopt the gold standard: Construct Validity. Meaning that the learning designed into the game is measured with the same rigor as the diagnostic tools in psychometrics. Through designing games with construct validity, the game scenarios can be shown to be definitively delivering and measuring the theoretical construct. Although this is the gold standard, it requires significant investment in time and money to develop. There are however, some methods from psychometrics that can be adopted in the design process of a serious game to reduce the probability of the Vegas Effect.
One methodological step that can be taken towards construct validity is to conduct a study of inter rater agreement on the game elements that deliver instruction. The inter-rater reliability method can be used to identify and score of how much agreement there is on whether the game content is what we say it is. One way to do this is to individually present the game content to a number of sequestered subject matter experts and ask them to judge. For example, we might present judges with number of scenarios from a game about Decision Making Stages based upon B. Aubrey Fisher’s four stages of group decision making (Fisher, 1970). To do this, the game developer might present the game scenarios to an expert on this topic and ask them to judge, whether the scenario is an example of Fisher’s Orientation Stage in Group Decision Making? Here is the definition:
Orientation stage- this phase is where members meet for the first time and start to get to know each other.
When the expert judges the scenarios, the responses from all the judges can be gathered and inter-rater reliability can be calculated from the responses using Cohen’s Kappa. If the percentage of agreement is low, either the scale (game scenario) is defective or the raters need to be re-trained. If agreement is high, the game scenario is a step closer to construct validity.
Inter-rater agreement is a simple, low-cost method for increasing assessment and content validity. This is an example of how traditional research methods from psychometrics can be integrated as part of the design process from the beginning. As suggested here, an early step in the design process is to conduct tests of inter-rater agreement.
This is an excerpt from:
Dubbels, B.R. (in preparation) The Importance of Construct Validity in Designing Serious Games for Return on Investment.
Works cited:
Fisher, B. A. (1970). Decision emergence: Phases in group decision making. Speech Monographs, 37, 53-66.
The work I have done surrounding games has led to improvement in reading scores. In 2006-2007, I took over the Language Arts Instruction for an entire middle school in Minneapolis, MN. The students were primarily drawn from North Minneapolis, qualified for free and reduced lunch, and were very bright, but were not scoring well on the standardized assessments. I implemented a curriculum that studied video games as new forms of narrative. Games tell stories, just like the anthologies stacked on my shelves. The difference was that when I pulled out the anthologies, classroom management became more challenging, as most of the kids were willing to get a behavioral referral than sit through a reading of “The Treasure of Lemon Brown” from the anthology.
These referrals were a lot of work, and there is no academic learning happening during that process.
I decided that instead of pushing stories at them, I should ask them what kind of media they liked. Most of them told me that they played video games and liked television, but few if any had any idea that there was anything of value in games besides entertainment. My role was to get them to understand literary elements, genre patterns, and critical thinking–the things being tested in the new standardized tests! The games provided an easy entry into narrative fiction, with the opportunity to also discuss genre and film techniques, as well as interaction and games studies.
Often people assume that kids are naturally good at games. That because they are young, that children are digital natives, and can comprehend and problem solves like secret genius in the wilds away from the classroom. Surprisingly, most kids are not fluent in how games work, they struggle with in-game problem solving, and they are often limited in discussing how games work. Surprised? One would have thought there would be an easy transfer of learning from games to books. But it was just not so.
There was no hidden genius here–many of the kids knew all about games, but few actually played them. Is this a digital native? When we use that term, we assume that these kids have great knowledge and critical thinking skills because of video games and television, and if we could only tap into them, they would show us the expertise we hoped was there with digital media, where they lacked with printed text. This was also found in a previous study.
Disappointing as that can be, games do offer a high interest, and more accessible narrative. I decided to use this opportunity to use their interest in games to develop their potential genius in books. Games provide interaction, social capital, and complex situations that kids can describe when taught to compose walkthroughs and multimedia book reports. The video games are actually were more accessible to kids: they have the same literary patterns, but the kids don’t have to take the step of decoding the words. This means we can practice literary elements with more accessible text. And I don’t mean infantilized “readability” accessible. I mean that the students were interacting with age appropriate, high interest, complex stories, and getting feedback as part of the game play. They could play and discuss, and build their awareness of the story, just like we do with reading circles.
The intent was to study games like we would study a printed text. Many of the students were game players, but few were very successful game players. This 9 week unit was well-received, as many of the students were interested in learning more about games, getting better at them, and doing something we did not ordinarily get to do in a classroom.
The difficulty that I was facing came from cultural beliefs about games. Many believe that games are devoid of learning and academic uses. This was especially true for many of my colleagues. They had the feeling that kids were just participating with weapons of mass distraction, and there would be a debt to pay on the upcoming state MCA2 reading test. For this reason, I made sure I educated my administrators, Milken TAP observers, and parents after I had done my planning. I made sue to invite stakeholders in to my room to observe, evaluate my instruction, and to interview kids and make them justify the unit by asking them direct questions about the value of studying games at school.
The kids did defend the unit, and made sure to back up what they were saying with examples. One student, Tony, when asked what value there was in studying Sonic the Hedghog replied, “you don’t understand, Sonic is just like the Odyssey story, he just wants to get home.”
Because a large percentage (38%) of my students were not even close to passing the Minnesota Basic Skills Test, I was questioned about the usefulness of this unit when I should be doing reading drill and practice. However, my administrators thought I had an innovative idea, and parents supported this unit.
So 38% of my eighth-graders had a cut score of 1 on the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST) — a test based upon recall– and we were about to face the Minnesota Comprehension Assessment 2 (MCA2), which is a comprehension assessment based upon genre patterns and literary elements. The standards for reading and literature asked for the students to understand plot, setting, theme, etc. This is not a recall test.
My kids were all bright, but they had disengaged from the testing process, and the preparation for it. Saying something would be on the test was not motivating, but comparing a game title they looked to other texts we read was motivating. Now we were getting the practice necessary for identifying the kind of conceptual information necessary to do well on the MCA2: they began learning literary elements and genre patterns.
I created this curriculum of game study. The organizing principle was that games are new forms of narrative, and that by studying game narratives, I could teach them literary elements and genre patterns. I created rubrics and assignments from the literary elements from the Minnesota state standards and integrated ideas from traditional Language Arts curriculum.
This is what happened:
You will notice that between Seventh grade (Blue) and the Eighth grade the following year (Green) there was significant improvement. During that eighth grade year, we had better scores on a harder test. In a year when we switched from the Minnesota Basic Skills Test to the Minnesota Comprehension Assessment to the MCA2, we had significant improvement across the cut scores.
What you see in comparing my eighth-graders (GREEN–took the harder MCA2) with the eighth-graders the year before (RED — took the MBS) was that there was a significant difference in achievement differences in the bottom performers. There were significantly fewer in the bottom cut score: a 9% movement out of “Does Not Meet”.
When comparing tmy students 05-06 seventh-grade students their scores as eighth-graders, there was a 12% improvement.
Not only was there improved test performance, but I was seeing my students return to school, and showing improved performance in the classroom, and on the test. The return of these kids was very satisfying and I had fun teaching the unit. What was great was the change in the learning culture. The kids really valued the time we spent and professed that they were learning. But it was also satisfying to see an increase in the amount of students who met or exceeded the higher standard.
The unit was not easy, but the students had something interesting and more concrete to apply the concepts I want them to learn. Remember, I built my games unit on the standards. Games are another narrative. They have all the same literary elements and genre patterns. My students were basically doing a technical writing assignment in the form of a multimedia book report.
The bottom line, they surpassed expectations on the more difficult MCA2 test. We were expected to go down 12%. We went completely the other way.
We did do complementary readings, like The Odyssey, Raisin in the Sun, Sonny’s Blues, Langston Hughes, and more. The key element was that the kids now had a portal into these other areas. The video games unit gave them success, and showed them they could do it. A big part of this was the creation of meaningful rubrics, and my taking a role as facilitator rather than know-it-all. I could ask, I could use the language of the rubrics like roadmaps for assessments.
But the learning did not stop there. The kids opened to the learning,and the became willing to open the books. And I know it worked. We were taken on a field trip to the Guthrie Theater, and on our tour, we were taken under the stage. The docent told us that where we were under the stage was called “the underworld”. The kids ALL looked at me, and said, “is this why you brought us here? Just like in the Odyssey?”
I said, “of course, yeah!” not having any idea, and we laughed.
We had practiced using the abstract concepts like literary elements and genre patterns with more accessible narratives (games), and applied what we learned about game studies to talk about literature. We used game studies to leverage printed text. Stanovich calls this compensation–warming up cognitive cold spots with warm ones.
This unit valorized activities that kids choose and participate in outside of school. It created a situation where kids who were often not high achievers, but were smart and understood the games, could now take leadership, and use their prior knowledge and experience with games, and help classmates. This was a win-win for developing academic skills, and life skills.
Central to the student’s success was that the instruction and assessment were grounded with an empirical model of reading comprehension, which viewed comprehension as the construction of mental representation. The better kids are at creating mental representation, the better they will be at questions and problem solving.
Once students can visualize and create mental representation, the can reflect upon the story and begin to apply the literary concepts and genre patterns. This was easier with games because they did not have to learn from a text, and get to the content through decoding symbols into meaning. When they payed a game, they saw and experienced, and could conceptualize from what Piaget called Image Schemas–mental representations from the senses, and learn the characteristics of the literary terms in the context of the things they were abstracted from.
What many kids who struggle with reading face is not cognitive deficits, but a poverty of experience, and thus experience with the world to attach to the words and concepts we want them to learn. If you don’t know about music, reading about it will not give you a personal, or deep understanding. You may understand in theory, by learning one abstraction by connecting it to another–but this is wholly different than having experience to develop concepts through induction, rather than deduction.
But that is often what we do in the classroom. Present the abstract concept, and ask them to learn in by reading–another abstract process dependent upon decoding and translating symbols into mental images. This seems backwards. Imagine a child who has never seen a peach, or known anything about peaches trying to decode, “he lifted the peach to his mouth and was surprised to be tickled as he took a bite.”
Without prior knowledge and experience, the child cannot know about peach fur. Would you imagine arms and tickling fingers?
Games and objects ground instruction, and provide the basis for experience and mental representation — comprehension. When we have this, we can spend less time decoding and more time discussing printed text. So by writing about accessible narratives such as games, we were more successful when reading related printed text. We had learned process, concepts, and deconstructing problems. This led to huge changes in student academic performance and confidence.
The majority of my curriculum that year was in studying video games as new narratives.
Here is the curriculum
Here is a story about what we were doing
Here is a class you can take I have been offering for the last seven years. You can take it online here at Professional Learning Board.
There is a lot to learn in a game, but there is a whole lot more to learn outside of the game in documenting, listening, presenting ideas, and extending them, than just playing the games themselves.
If you want, there is a whole bunch of games curriculum on my teaching blog for language arts, reading, engineering, computer science, etc.
Everything from board games to curriculum for analysis of a time line. You might notice that they are set up to be run like a game.
I am hoping that this article makes a start for teachers embracing a model where they consider Learning by Design.Interestingly, games are also involved in assessment, and kids like to know their scores. The scores are an indication of learning.
And the learning is the fun part, the content and the problems are hard and learning is not always easy, but it can be desirable. Games are hard too, oddly enough, but when enough kids play them, and it creates enough buzz as social capital, there will be interest and some sacrifice to try and persevere in learning.
Tenacity, and metacognition are learned traits. With games and play, we can teach them.
Technology and Literacy
Current and Emerging Practices with Student 2.0 and Beyond
David G. O’Brien Brock Dubbels
Guiding Questions
- What technology tools and Web 2.0 applications are important for literacy learning
- What are the best practices involving technology and literacies
- How can instruction in the classroom and curriculum be enhanced by using new and evolving technologies that support digital literacy practices?
This chapter provides an overview of evolving research and theoretical frameworks on technologies and literacy, particularly digital technologies, with implications for adolescents’ literacy engagement. We suggest future directions for engaging students with technology and provide resources that support sound practices.
Evolving Research on Digital Technologies:
From Frameworks to Best Practice
When Kamil, Intrator, and Kim (2000) tackled a synthesis of research on technologies and literacy, they termed the task a conundrum. Given the rapidly evolving landscape of various technologies, that review, now dated (as this chapter soon will be), is still insightful both in reviewing a diversity of topics and the evolving importance of each. For example, at the turn of the decade, these researchers gave us historical footing in matters such as how computers and software may be used to improve reading and writing (Kamil, 1982), and to motivate learners (Hague & Mason, 1986). They noted the rising significance of hypertext and hypermedia, and foreshadowed the explosion of interest in the intersection of traditional literacies and digital media, which, at the turn of the decade, comprised a new program of inquiry (Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1998). Finally, they also highlighted the social and collaborative importance of students working on stand-alone computers or in collaborative network environments, cited the paucity of research overall
on technologies and literacy, and expressed optimism about the future of computers as instructional tools.
In the same volume that featured the synthesis by as Kamil, Intrator, and Kim, Leu (2000) used the phrase “literacy as technological deixis†(p. 745) to refer to the constantly changing nature of literacy due to rapidly morphing technologies. Leu’s characterization is crucial, because he posits that these literacies are moving targets, evolving too rapidly to be adequately studied. If best practices rest on a solid research foundation, then, in the case of technologies and literacy we haven’t even begun to know what best practices are. Nevertheless, even in the midst of a shallow bed of “empirical†studies—that is, studies of specific effects, over time, with statistical power, or studies of carefully described and documented, contextualized practices—compelling frameworks have emerged, with implications for how technologies enable new literacy practices. Best practices, if based on solid frameworks rather than a carefully focused research program, can be extrapolated from the frameworks and be the basis for sound instruction and curriculum planning. In this chapter we bridge some of these frameworks with instructional practice.
The relatively brief evolution of technologies and literacy has led us from computers and software as self-contained instructional platforms to a networked virtual world that computers enable. In the past 10 years or so, we have moved from viewing the Web as primarily a source of information and as a sort of dynamic hypertext with increasingly sophisticated search engines, to Web 2.0. Albeit a fuzzy term that has accrued definitions ranging from simply a new attitude about the old Web to a host of perspectives about a completely new Web, Web 2.0 presents exciting possibilities for enhancing instruction and learning. This new Web is an open environment with virtual applications; it is more dependent on people than on hardware; it more participatory than a one-sided flow of information (e.g., blogging, wikis, social networks); it is more responsive to our needs (e.g., mapping a route to a previously unknown destination). Perhaps most important, Web 2.0 is more open to sharing of ideas, media, and even computer code (Miller, 2005). The presence of Web 2.0 is about the World Wide Web (WWW) as a platform for production. Software that users would normally purchase and install from a disk or download is now hosted on the Internet. In a sense, Web 2.0 affords anyone access to the largest stage yet conceived. Educationally, it has the potential to diminish the broadcast mode of information transmission that has reduced individual interests and engagement. Instead, learners can now have at their disposal studio-quality tools that enhance production, appreciation, recognition, and performance, and above all, provide access to a worldwide audience.
Whereas research on computers and reading and writing has remained sparse, research on the myriad literacy practices involved in the Web 2.0 phenomenon is sparse but growing rapidly and is informed by many theoretical frames and fields, most of which overlap—for example, multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996), new literacies and new literacy studies (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008; Kist, 2005; Knobel & Lankshear, 2007), media studies and new media studies (Hobbs, 2007; Kress, 2003), and critical media literacy and popular culture (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Beach & O’Brien, 2008), to name a few.
Each of these frameworks has its own dynamics for describing and studying literacy practices, and each is inextricably intertwined with other frameworks. In the rapidly emerging research base, most of the designs are highly contextualized and theoretically tantalizing, but few studies are gauged to identify specific generalizable practices. For example, the studies designed around some of the aforementioned frameworks vary in terms of methodology (spanning the full range of human and cognitive sciences); they vary in terms of which data are collected, which settings (physical and virtual) are studied, and how learners are defined (e.g., as information processors, real selves, virtual selves, identity constructors). Hence, we can present here only a small sampling and complement the descriptions with some “best practice†exemplars, reminding readers of the caveat that “research-based†practices represent glimpses or snapshots taken along the rapidly moving field.
Reader and Writer 2.0: New Literates and New Literacies
What is important about technologies and literacies, especially when considering adolescents? What should we cull from the myriad evolving frameworks and perspectives to be able to present something useful for teachers and learners at this point in time given this rapidly changing texture. First, we want to present the adolescent learner, the person we call Student 2.0, starting with a vignette.
High school students in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis,posted photos on Facebook revealing themselves partying with alcohol, in violation of school rules. Following an investigation by school officials, disciplinary action was taken against 13 students. Students who believed that that the administration went too far walked out of school in protest; some of the parents threatened legal action (Xiong & Relerford, 2008). Scholars of digitally mediated popular culture challenged theadults, parents and school officials alike, to evaluate more critically what had happened: High school students felt a compelling need to express themselves as digital authors and document a relatively common practice, partying with alcohol. And issuing sanctions assumes that the practice had not been widespread before it was expressed publicly on Facebook. Prosecution of the rule offenders would only serve to remind the documentors to be more careful. The new media scholars also reminded the youth as authors to consider more carefully their audience in the future. When you post on Facebook, you create for everyone, including school administrators and parents. Some students who were interviewed on television reacted to the disciplinary measures by saying that their rights to free speech were violated, that the school administrators had no jurisdiction, because the activities happened off of school grounds. Others went back to Facebook to start a new group page to defend their actions.The Eden Prairie incident, albeit intriguing as a local interest piece about controversial legal and ethical issues regarding the Web 2.0, illustrates the trend of online content creation among youth. Rather than just use the Web to locate information, students are involved in content creation, that continues to grow, with 64% of online “teenagers†ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004 (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007). In this national survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 55% of online teens ages 12–17 say that they have
created a profile on a social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace, and 47% of online teens claim to have uploaded photos where others can see them. Even though those students posting online photos sometimes restrict access, they expect feedback. Nearly 9 out of 10 teens who post photos online (89%) say that people comment on their postings at least some of the time. The number of teen bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006, with girls leading boys in blogging, and the younger, upcoming girls more likely to outblog The important issue for teachers is that these student authors are composing in a visual mode and reading comments printed in response; their peer readers (who are also most likely composers) are increasingly “reading†images and composing text responses or print messages in blogs and expecting critical responses. In short, students increasingly seem to engage in the
types of reading and writing they either don’t engage in, or don’t prefer, at school.
Experienced teachers can remember when stand-alone computers were going to revolutionize education; they can recall when the Internet was a cumbersome, text-based environment rather than an engaging graphical environment called the WWW. Those of us who, as literacy educators, have spent our careers studying how young people interact with printed texts are now faced with a new landscape that renders many of our theoretical models, instructional frameworks, and “best†practices based on these print models inadequate or even obsolete. Print text remains important but, as noted, expression is increasingly multimodal (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). Reading and writing youth are increasingly likely to express ideas using different semiotic modes, including print, visual, and audio modes, and to create hybrid texts that defy typical associations between modes and what they traditionally represent.

When David worked with struggling readers in a high school Literacy Lab, the students, many of whom did not choose to read and write using print, wrote complex multimodal texts on a range of topics. They were very articulate about the affordances of various modes, and how those affordances influenced their choices in composition. For example, one group of students working a project exploring the impact of violence in the medion in adolescents, decided when to use images instead of print to communicate their ideas more effectively and passionately. They carefully planned how to juxtapose images and print to convey meaning. What would traditionally have been termed a “report†was instead a mul- timedia project, which they presented to parents and others at the school Open House evening. Brock has created a game studies unit, in which students study the qualities of their video games and create a technical document called a Walk- through using blogs, a wiki, video, and an animated slide show embedded into the blog. Students could read, compare, and evaluate other students’ work. Brock used an RSS feed (really simple syndication, a feed link to syndicated content) and had the blogs collected with bloglines, a way to both aggregate the student work and provide social networking through the WWW-based platforms and the comment sections for students.From these two examples, you can see that the reading and composition enabled by these digital technologies is spatial rather than linear. Linearity has been replaced by reading and writing in virtual textual space—where a hot link lures the reader away from one page and on to the next, and from print to images and video, deeper and deeper into one’s unique textual experience, and writers can post, broadcast, and receive responses. Scholars are already starting to look at the new spatial and temporal dimensions of digital literacies, as well as the compatibilities and incompatibilities of these dimensions
with traditional spatial and temporal dimensions of schools (Leander, 2007). Researchers are also studying new literacy environments such as web pages using research paradigms derived from reading print on paper—for example, Coiro and Dobler’s (2007) work extending traditional comprehension theories to study online reading comprehension. Coiro and Dobler argue that although we know a lot about the reading strategies that skilled readers use to understand print in linear formats, we know little about the proficiencies needed to comprehend text in “electronic†environments. McEneaney (2006) cogently argues that the traditional theoretical frameworks, including so-called “interactive theories†(from cognitive or transactional perspectives) are too strongly based in a traditional notion of print to be useful. With what are the new literates interacting? McEneaney contends that the text can “act on†the environment: The text can create the reader, just as the reader through the dynamics of online environments, can create or change the text.
But the new literates also encounter new challenges. The new textual spatiality lacks the kinesthetic texture of books; readers lose their “places†and even the ability to feel the touch of the page as they do when they flip paper pages back, then reorient themselves on the page (Evans & Po, 2007). The feel of the text is replaced by the feel of a finger on a mouse or a key. The imaging that helps a reader maintain and access the previous page might be replaced by multiple mental images of more rapidly changing texts, or mental images replaced by actual images. What Evans and Po call the fluidity of the digital or electronic texts invites readers to alter the text more readily, more easily. We come full circle with a tension faced by readers of the digital texts. On the one hand, this text fluidity begs readers to alter texts, to pick alternative texts, and to mix and match texts; on the other hand, this new textuality, with texts unfolding at every mouse click, places the text itself more in the control of the reader. The text the reader creates, often unwittingly via a series of clicks or cuts and pastes, may address the reader/writer in unexpected ways. One of the most exciting prospects for educators is the unlimited range of texts, from traditional print modes to various hybrids, including print texts, visual texts, audio texts, and even various types of performance texts that students can now create, as they themselves are “created†or changed by those texts. The new literates can navigate through a collage of print, images, videos, and sounds, choosing and juxtaposing modalities, and bending old spatial and temporal constraints to communicate to peers and to others throughout the world.
Beach and O’Brien (2008), in drawing from both the philosophy of mind and neuroscience (e.g., Clark, 2003; Restak, 2003) propose that the students of the “digital generation†have more digitally adept brains; they read and write differently than youth from even 10 years ago, because their existence
in the mediasphere, the barrage of multimodal information they encounter daily, the constant availability of multiple tech tools at their fingertips, and the convergence enabling immediate use and production of media have changed the way they process multimedially. Prensky (2001) has posited a similar scenario. The Beach and O’Brien proposal (2008), in response to a Kaiser Family Foundation study (Foehr, 2006) of young people ages 8–18 and widely disseminated in the popular press, shows that even though the total amount of time devoted to media use remains about the same as 5 years ago (6.5
hours a day), the amount of time devoted to multitasking, using multiple forms of media concurrently (e.g., surfing the Web while listening to an MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) and checking text messages), is on the rise. Beach and O’Brien (2008) contend that multitasking is not accurate, because it implies the ability to engage in several activities at the same time or, more accurately,to switch attention rapidly among activities to gain efficiency in completing work. They instead characterized this often seamless juggling as multimediating (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003), because it more accurately involves not only multimodal attention shifts but also seems to include a new facility and flexibility in processing and producing multimodal texts. The missing piece in characterizing the new literates is that we continue to appraise them using outdated models of reading, text processing, and learning. Instead, we need
to think of them as more adept at using technologies to read, compose, and “socialize.â€
Texts 2.0: From the Page to the Screen
Let us revisit the question posed in the last section—What is important about technologies and literacies?—and this time consider the evolving kinds of texts that youth are reading and writing. Again, we have to choose among compelling frameworks and perspectives. One salient issue surrounding the
evolving technologies is how the notion of “text†is changing. We are “moving from the page to the screen†(Kress, 2003). Kress notes that the screen privileges images. He also makes a case for the ambiguity of images and the necessity of print text for helping the viewer understand context and make a
directed interpretation of images. As educators, we have to concede that texts are increasingly multimodal (Jewitt & Kress, 2003). In multimodal reading and composing, ideas and concepts are represented with print texts, visual texts (photographs, video, animations), audio texts (music, audio narration, sound effects), and even dramatic or other artistic performances (drama, dance, spoken-word) (O’Brien & Scharber, 2008).
A second change is the increasing popularity of hybrid texts that are unlike most of the longer, connected discourse with which many of us grew up. For example, textoids are on the rise. These texts were originally defined as specially created research texts that lacked the coherence and structure of naturally occurring texts from typical genres (Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997) or contrived instructional texts (Pearson, 2004). Ironically, these once- contrived texts are ubiquitous in online environments. The term textoids now refers to fleeting texts that are transported from one place to another and are constantly changing (e.g., Wikipedia entries, pasted into a student’s report and edited to fit into the new textual context); they are also textual bursts of information sent to cell phones as text messages. Short textoids or text bursts are displacing longer discourse as readers expect more choices in accessing information and entertainment faster in quick clicks. At the same time, the sheer number and range of genres of these textoids, the juxtaposition of textoids with other media, and the retention of the more traditional, longer discourse, makes reading in online text environments more challenging than reading in traditional print environments.
The typical ways of describing and distinguishing texts from one another, such as using text structure, no longer apply (McEneaney, 2006). Electronic texts defy such classification, because they may be short and contrived to produce a targeted burst to get attention (the textoids); they are not linear but
spatial (hypertexts, hypermedia). Single textoids or pages or articles are linear, but they exist in virtual space, with a multitude of other possible texts. In short, the texts have virtual structure that is much more dynamic than static structures assigned to single print texts.
Present Technology Tools and Web 2.0 Applications
As we noted, Web 2.0 tools are about production, and they are hosted on the Web to enable a range of activities. As the access to bandwidth increases, and computers are equipped with greater image/video processing capacity, these tools will become invaluable in engaging youth. Young people will use these tools not only to develop literacy and numeracy skills but also to continue to hone their technological skills in the production, communication networking, data mining, and problem solving that are increasingly valued in the global economy. In the past, many of the tools now available as Web-based tools were expensive, limited to single machines, and difficult to use. These same tools, such as word processing, multimedia production, and network communications tools are now free, shareable, collaborative, and perceived as both meaningful and enjoyable by young people. Moreover, the tools are
part of young people’s daily lives. In addition, the personal electronics that many young people carry in their pockets, backpacks, and purses are more powerful than the computers that inhabited labs not even 5 years ago. With the advent of new applications and relatively cheap storage on the Web, these portable devices neither perform the bulk of processing nor store the outputs of processing; they are access devices—Web portals, with small screens and keyboards or other ways to input data. For example if you want to work with pictures, you can access a portal such as Flickr to view and manage pictures; if you want to create a document of just about any stripe, you can go to Google Docs and make slide shows; engage in word processing; construct spreadsheets; and store, share, and collaborate with writing partners.
Teachers can use many of these tools to extend and to enhance the learning experience of their students. The tools present challenges in developing best practices because they are neither repositories of content nor self- contained curricula. Rather, they can be used by creative teachers who are
able to draw from existing content domains, themes, and conceptual frameworks as they work within the applications; the tools can provide supportive environments for producing content, sharing and collaborating around content, and hosting public displays of users’ productions. Hence, the tools are not useful without the context of a larger unit or lesson plan, and instructional and learning frameworks that support activities and literate practices enabled by the tools. Teachers must understand clearly their instructional and learning objectives and goals, and students must know how the tools can help them meet those goals. Otherwise, the tools, which students sometimesknow well and can use for entertainment, revert to users’ tools for pleasure and interests, easily circumventing instructional or learning practices desired by teachers. Next, we review some Web 2.0 tools that enable these practices, and describe the features of each, presenting examples of how we have used them with students.
MySpace
We start with the nemesis of most computer classrooms and labs. For example, Brock was observing another teacher’s students during a drafting class. The students were working in a lab with high-end three-dimensional drafting software. During downtime between instructions that were broadcast over the
public address system, students often checked their MySpace pages. Although the site was blocked in the district, many students easily overcame the obstacle by searching for a proxy server that granted them access. A proxy server is a website that has a name accepted by the firewall, so it is allowed—it is kind of like using a fake ID. Although students may not know how it works, they have learned how to do it. And no matter how savvy the information technology (IT) department, the almost infinite supply of new proxy servers and webpages, with directions targeting youth who want to jump the school restrictions, makes sites deemed objectionable by school districts difficult to block.
On the one hand, to the digital immigrants and the inhabitants of the Institution of Old Learning (O’Brien & Bauer, 2005), MySpace represents an uncontrolled virtual space that distracts students from work and enables socializing and forms of expression incompatible with the organization and temporal control of school. On the other hand, for digital natives, “assimilated†digital immigrants, and new literacies advocates, MySpace is a dynamic forum of multimodal expression. It is also a place where young people socialize with peers around the world, put pictures up, write in slang, stream music and video, and engage in instant messaging. They are able to blog, to embed flash animations—in short, to engage in almost limitless expression using a range of multimodal literacies. It is really an example of students expressing themselves in the same way they dress, decorate their rooms, or draw in their notebooks.
This does not mean that the space is benign. Although you can connect with friends and family, you can also get solicitations from unwanted characters. Most young people are aware of whom to talk to, and how they expect others to speak to them. Users know that others mask their true identities through the computer, which has led young people to be more savvy as well. The Kaiser Family Foundation Generation M report (Roberts, Rideout, & Foehr, 2005) notes that when kids come across inappropriate sites and solicitations, they move past them. For digital natives, experienced in social networking, these are just another distraction in the way of what they went to the site to do. MySpace sites can also be locked to persons other than those invited by the owner.
We don’t expect sites like MySpace to be imported into the school curriculum. However, in the spirit of being more assimilated into Generation M’s world, it makes sense for teachers to join MySpace, set up a page, and even let students know that you have done so. As teachers, we interact regularly with our students via MySpace. Through it, we are more in tune with their social worlds, their interests, and their creativity. You might also want to bridge media production in school with the sharing features of such social networking sites, so that students may use tools like MySpace as a way to share and to get feedback on their productions.
You already know a bit about Facebook from the Eden Prairie vignette. It is a place where you can post your profile and surround yourself with friends, their activities (including photos of parties!) and favorite sites, and connect the dots to all of your websites. Brock has links to SlideShare, mogulus television station, Facebook social networking groups, and various blogs. Facebook also includes tons of little games, multiple ways you can communicate with others, and things you can share. Brock is a member of many groups, and when the mood catches him, he starts another group: How about people who have read this chapter and want to continue the discussion about literacies involved in applications for Student 2.0? It really is that easy, and he really did start that group.
In Facebook you can choose to keep up with friends you don’t see often, as well as friends and acquaintances with similar interests and affinities. You can take surveys of movies and compare them to your friends; you can see what kind of German or French philosopher you are. You can share music,
keep up to date with friends through instant messaging, and be alerted to activities of groups to which you belong. Facebook, like MySpace, is blocked in many school districts, although most of adolescents we know seem to prefer MySpace. As with MySpace, we encourage teachers to set up a Facebook account to see what it provides. Although it might be tricky if the site is officially blocked in school, we also encourage teachers to use it to network with both colleagues and students. One of the great revelations, if you are included as a “friend†to students classified as “struggling†in reading and writing, is the quality, the range of genres, and the passion with which these students compose and engage in reading others’ compositions on social networking sites. It is possible that these same students, who have negative perceptions about their abilities and avoid reading and writing in school, might invite teachers to read what they have written online.
YouTube
Unfortunately, YouTube is much maligned in schools, not just because of the content, but also because streaming media consume bandwidth. This is the most complete compendium of online searchable video ever. Like any compendium, including the billions of webpages outer there, there are some videos
that teachers may find either objectionable or a waste of time, just as there are thousands of interesting and informative videos. There are really many opportunities for using Web-based video in the classroom. Here are several ways that we have used it:
1. To show a video.
2. To host a video we have produced.
3. To engage in social networking.
4. To enhance engagement among students.
5. To provide content for a Web-based, TV-like network with Mogulus. Â Â (now Livestream)
The real value of video is its impact due to availability of narrative, and the power of performing and presenting to the world—something that local and even national networks cannot do. YouTube not only hosts videos created by your students but also provides access to videos created by novices and professionals from all over the world. YouTube should be a part of classroom instruction designed to teach appropriate use of media and media savvy to young people. With YouTube you can embed video in your blog and your website, as well as upload your own creations—even from your cellular phone. We have observed that when students create for performance and presentation to an audience other than their teachers and immediate peers, they put forth much more effort and are much more creative and engaged, and the learning experience lasts long after the week-and-a-half extinction point of most test- driven curricula. Students can create, post, and share. In addition, teachers can create groups and utilize social networking to perform and to respond. The most powerful benefit is that this social networking and broadcasting function extends and deepens the possibility of participating in high-traffic media networks, where millions of people may view your work and send out links to invite their friends to see what you have done. With the right topic and a bit of luck, a cell phone with video capture and a good idea can start a person’s career in video media. This prospect can be motivating, and the idea that students have done something that everyone can see leads them to some real street “media cred.â€
Flickr
This photo sharing website, web services suite, and online community platform was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular website for sharing personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Flickr’s popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means, a social/collaborative way to create and manage tags for content, in contrast to traditional subject indexing, in which content is fit to subjects predetermined by experts (Vander Wal, 2007). In Flickr, metadata are generated by not only experts but also creators and consumers of the content. Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004, with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, although they are also used in other contexts. Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time.
As folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can discover who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, a folksonomy user may discover the tag sets of another user who similarly interprets and tags content. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user’s capacity to find related content (a practice known as pivot browsing). Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: Compared to the choice of the search tools that websites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by the community. Obviously, in addition to being a place to share photos, Flickr is a great source of media form students’ multimedia productions.
Blogger
Brock has used this one, putting his class blog (www.5th-teacher. blogspot.com) up on the screen, with images, examples, links to other resources, related news events, goings on in the class, his teaching manifesto, and global descriptions of assignments, as well as breakdowns of daily work. He also embeds his slide shows in the blog, along with video. This provides a resource for students to use both in class and outside of class. Because students have learned the format, and how to use pictures and other media from the Web, they have become proficient at creating reflective work and high-quality
multimedia productions. Blogger gets a bad rap by some, but you can limit the audience of student blogs by closing them off from the world feature and selecting viewers by inviting specific people. This also allows the teacher to access the blog if there is questionable content for classroom blogs “gone rogue.â€
SlideShare
This Web application is great for getting students to see the opportunities of creating active multimedia products. Brock’s students created slide shows in PowerPoint, using images, text, and animation and transition effects, then uploaded them to SlideShare. This allowed the class to create their own group (Washburn Introduction to Engineering Design [IED]) where they could see and comment on each others’ slides, as well as use the chat function. Students also use SlideCast, in which they enter and synchronize an MP3 with their presentation, so that both teachers and students can create music videos or even do voice-over narration for telling stories and performance (dramatic) readings. SlideShare also lets you one-click to Blogger, so that students may embed their slide show in their blog. A cool feature is the ability to link this into Facebook.
Google Suite
Google provides a nice suite of tools for educators and students. Often your students have computers with Internet access at home but lack productivity software, such as Microsoft Office, or free tools such as OpenOffice. Students can use the Google Suite to create word processing, slide shows, and spreadsheets. The impressive feature is that this suite is available online, so students with an Internet connection can work at home on the document they created at school. And as with other Web 2.0 applications, students may invite others to cowrite and produce documents here. This allows groups to work on the same paper, and it also tracks each person’s contributions as the document is created. We used Google Documents to collaborate on this chapter. In addition, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google SketchUp, a three-dimensional modeling program, are other tools in the Google suite that deserve extra emphasis. Reading and writing practices are more engaging to students when tied to the creation of the places, people, and activities. Brock had students create scenes from the play A Raisin in the Sun using this tool. The class explored the role of place and lived space, and the way space influences how people feel, speak, and act. This high-tech diorama was reminiscent of the shoebox versions we sometimes made for fun or for school projects.
Zotero
Zotero, an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool, helps researchers gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, webpages, images, andother objects), and share research results in a variety of ways. An extension of the popular open-source Web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts
of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields, and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and Web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the Web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the
Web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other Web services and applications; because it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (e.g., Microsoft Word). It can also be used offline (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without Wi-Fi).
Scribd
This document-sharing community and self-publishing platform enables anyone to publish easily, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. You can submit, search for, and comment on e-books, presentations, essays, academic papers, newsletters, photo albums, school work, and sheet music. A powerful feature of this tool is that you can upload documents in many different formats, including Microsoft Word, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), plain text, hypertext markup language (HTML), PowerPoint, Excel, OpenOffice, Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), and many other formats. Once your documents are uploaded, you can embed them in a blog, Facebook profile, or other external websites, with your fonts, images, and formatting fully intact. Each document hosted at Scribd has its own unique uniform resource locator (URL), and you have unlimited storage, so you can
upload as many documents as you like. Once these are up, they are also available for fast indexing by Google and other major search engines, so that your content can be found in simple searches. You can keep certain documents private or share with a limited number of friends, and you can automatically convert published content into PDF, Word, and plain text. What is engaging for young writers is that not only can they publish widely but they also can see how many people have viewed their documents by location. Through Google you find documents similar to your own, as well as connect with a community of writers working in the same content area, enabling feedback and dialogue about your documents yet allowing you to retain full copyright under Creative Commons licenses.
Other Web 2.0 Resources
Space limits preclude a more elaborate listing of the multitude of other Web 2.0 sites. We recommend that readers of this chapter peruse the following briefly annotated list of other sites promoting multimodal literacies:
• Digg. A community-based, popular news article website, where news stories and websites are submitted by users, then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.
• bubbl.us. An online brainstorming tool that students and teachers can use to create colorful mind maps online, share maps and collaborate with friends, embed mind maps in blogs or websites, e-mail and print maps, and save maps as images.
• BigHugeLabs.com. A tool that makes using Flickr a lot more interesting by capitalizing on the site’s existing functionality. Dozens of toys, games, and utilities allow you, for example, to create a magazine cover from a selected Flickr photo, create a motivational poster, and access huge amounts of user    data (FlickrDNA).
• Photoshop Express. An application providing two gigabytes of storage to which you can link in your blogs or websites. You can edit images on the fly without having to up/download them each time or move from computer to computer, and you are just a login away from your library of photos.
• SoundJunction. A site where users can take music apart and find out how it works, create music, find out how other people make and perform music, learn about musical instruments, and look at the backgrounds of different musical styles.
• del.icio.us. (pronounced like the word delicious). A social bookmarking Web service for storing and sharing data with more than 3 million users and 100 million bookmarked URLs.
• Ning. A site that enables the creation of one’s own social network, designed to compete with sites like MySpace and Facebook, by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests, or who have limited technical skills.
• VoiceThread. A versatile online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents, and videos) and allow people to make comments in five different ways—using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam)—and share them with anyone they wish.
• Many Eyes. A tool for the visual representation of data that makes sharing data creative and fun, while tuning students into the relation between information presentation and interpretation.
• Scratch. A designing tool with a language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.
Classroom Vignettes of Practices with Technologies and Literacy
Junior High “Intervention†Class
We have studied our reading/writing intervention class in a suburban community of the Twin Cities for 3 years (O’Brien, Beach, & Scharber, 2007). The class uses a Literacy Lab setting with a reduced enrollment target of 15 students, previously assessed as struggling in reading, and mentored by two
teachers, both of whom hold K–12 reading licenses. The class meets once a day in a block scheduling format, with 93-minute class periods. The curriculum juxtaposes traditional engagement activities with “new literacies†activities. For example, on the side of more traditional interventions, students use
the Scholastic READ 180 program, read and discuss young adult novels as a group, and dramatize the texts and a range of activities to integrate reading and writing. They also engage in strategies instruction, such as the use of mind mapping and various activities designed specifically to help students achieve competence on state language arts standards and high-stakes assessments. On the new literacies side, using various technology tools, the students engage in writing activities, such as producing stories, comic books (using Comic Life), wikis (in Moodle) and poetry writing. They write journal responses to their reading and construct PowerPoint presentations about topics, such as their favorite video games or young adult novels, and share their poetry or story writing. They plan, design, and perform radio plays (using GarageBand for background tracks and sound effects). Recently, students completed placebased projects in which they used VoiceThread to publish photos of important places in their school, complete with audio or print commentaries. They publish their writing in the school district Moodle site. Some of the students also participate in afterschool computer gaming sessions. In the new literacies realm, the teachers include practices in which students engage to explore ideas, construct a classroom community, and develop agency in meeting personally relevant goals.
Media Class Rhythm and Flow Unit
This was the first unit that Brock created after transitioning from a language arts teacher to a media specialist. He found that the units he taught as a language arts teacher were still very applicable to the standards and benchmarks in media technologies when it came to teaching media or print texts, or the many opportunities that arise as a result of having access to computers. As a media specialist, Brock tried to link the media and technology activities to improvement in reading and writing. For example, he included Reading Friday, in which students had to create a music business persona/image, describe their style of music, and choose lyrics that they would perform and record into Garage Band. GarageBand is one option. Students could also use one of the Web-based products we have discussed. So the students took print texts—poems, paragraphs, dialogue, and lyrics they liked—and recorded themselves reading as a track on the music software. They also recorded outtakes, or descriptions of the experiences, and rated their oral interpretation performances. After students had shared their tracks with Brock, they began to practice putting a beat and music behind the tracks. This enabled a thorough interpretation and exploration of voice and oral expression. Students who had never really thought about the qualities of the voices in the narratives (e.g., the tone, theme, pitch, volume, emphasis in elongation and breaks) could better hear and understand dramatic pauses, tone and volume changes, diction and word choices, as well as format, organization, and punctuation. This activity began to make a difference in students’ understanding of these concepts. As students began exploring pauses work, changing and emphasizing words, assonance, and resonance in rhyme structures, they were really looking at oral reading and fluency, and reading in general, in a much deeper and more playful way. Students then took photos and made their CD covers, using image manipulation software; they made their own liner notes and wrote their own copy for advertising; they conceptualized a MySpace design (because they were not permitted access to MySpace) and created tours, clothing, and so on. It turned into a game about being in the music business. This unit, which had originally been intended as a week-long reward for the kids, so engaged students as they performed their lyrics and created their music careers that Brock extended it for 2 weeks.
What are “best practices†in these scenarios? First, students engage in activities, using technologies that support both the local curriculum and state standards. Rather than considering technologies and innovation as replacements for more traditional instructional and learning, the technologies provide
more effective ways to engage students. Second, best practices dictate that the technologies enhance teaching and learning by providing access to media and enabling students to use various modalities to explore and publish ideas. Third, although we can already see a future in which digital literacies replace traditional print literacies, for now, given the realities of standards, print-centric assessments, and, particularly the predominately print-based curricula, best practices explore ways to bridge print and digital literacies effectively. Fourth, the notion of best practices, which we typically associate with teaching or facilitating learning, should be extended to include practices related to supporting infrastructures and increasing funding for technologies that do enhance teaching and learning.
Future Directions and Best Practices for Engaging Students in Literacy with Technology
Clearly, the future will bring a wider range of more accessible digital tools. What started as the Web 2.0 phenomenon will continue at a rapid rate as the analog television bandwidth is purchased by Web Portals, such as Google, to provide faster access to more and more data from small personal communication devices—things that we used to call “phones.†As shown by current studies from the Pew Internet and American Life project, youth will continue to use more media and engage in more media multitasking or multimediating. As more young people have access to these tools, the digital divide will persist but not be as defined. As educators, we will slowly but surely start to redefine learners based on the experiences these young people have daily in the mediasphere, and the way their brains are changing as result. Similarly, we will start to redefine literacy more in line with the new literacies practices in which youth engage outside of school, and to think of better ways to connect out-of- school and in-school experiences with technologies and literacy.
Given the frameworks briefly described in this chapter for understanding technology-enabled or enhanced texts and new literacies practices, what are some possible practices that will not only produce more engaged and better readers and writers, as traditionally defined, but also facilitate practices
that improve intertextual, intermedial, and multimodal understanding? We briefly outline some of these realizing that practices, they are morphing as we write, and that new ones will have emerged even before this chapter is published. We offer these not so much as static examples but as ways of thinking about best practices in the milieu of new and emerging technologies, and new literacies and literates. We want fellow educators to think in novel ways about how these new technologies may improve literacy practices, not because of their technical features, but because they are engaging. Although it is over simplistic to state that technologies are worthwhile simply because they are motivating, we might cautiously state that technologies are engaging because they often incorporate aspects of play, are pleasurable, and are associated with leisure time outside of school. We also argue that good technology can guide and extend students’ knowledge of the world and their relationship to it, and that the software and appliances it inhabits are means for guidance, creativity, and production. Here are some recommended practices as we to end this decade and head into the next.
Engaging Readers and Writers
Young people should have access to curricula and learning opportunities in which reading and writing strategies instruction is not always the focus; rather the focus is to provide high-interest engaging activities that allow young people to accomplish goals using a range literacy tools and practices, many of them enabled by technology. Young people can become very strategic about what tools they use and how they use them to engage in practices that produce personally relevant outcomes. Learners need to be strategic, but they do not always benefit most from being taught strategies. And, as we noted, it is quite possible that the learners we are trying to engage are harder to engage because of their experiences in the mediashpere. In Brock’s teaching, texts aren’t necessarily print texts; rather, they are multimodal messages (Dubbels, 2008). For example, Brock has even used allegorical paintings and text as movement activities and multimodal analogues to decoding and propositional levels of comprehension.
Connecting with Out-of-School Literacies
As educators, we should make a more concerted effort to connect school instructional practices and curricula to out-of-school practices. Literate practices involved in activities such as instant messaging, creating and reading images, authoring webpages, and participating in social networks are ignored, devalued, or even feared in schools. In contrast, students engagement in strategies instruction, skills instruction, and reading textbooks and answering questions is common. Although these traditional activities and assessments are important, and more directly tied to valued outcomes, such as performance on high-stakes tests, they are increasingly disconnected from the new literacies skills, knowledge, and abilities that youth use the most, and they are simply not as engaging as many of the digital literacies practiced outside of school. The digital tools, and the practices they support, some of
which we present shortly, are not intended to turn youth completely away from traditional academic reading and learning; rather, they are intended to engage them in novel ways with important content and learning tasks. The goal, as we noted, is to engage students in these practices, to improve their
learning, and to connect the learning to personally relevant goals.
Taking Advantage of Multimodality
Traditional print materials, such as textbooks, have changed little over the last 150 years, and they have performed admirably as the staple of the curriculum. But given the range of teaching and learning tools enabled by new and emerging technologies, print materials alone are increasingly inadequate, not
to mention uninteresting, to young people. Students are increasingly able to use a range of tools to compose and to understand complex ideas, to convey beliefs and emotions, and to share their creations in print, visual, aural, and even tactile and kinesthetic forms. The most straightforward practice to capitalize on the multimodality of digital texts is simply to make the tools available (e.g., computers, digital cams and audio recorders, multimedia authoring tools, Web authoring tools, Web 2.0 tools) and provide practice in using them. A more involved approach is to think systematically of multimodal
options for existing tasks and assignments (e.g., a media inquiry project in place of a report; a blog in place of a term paper), and to provide for students a choice in the modalities and tools they use. David and his colleagues did just this in the Literacy Lab at Jeff High School (O’Brien, 2006; O’Brien, Springs, & Stith, 2001) when they reconstructed an entire literacy curriculum to take advantage of a multimedia lab they set up.
Examining Stances toward Technology
Ideally, to construct digitally enabled curricula, youth need educators who are either capable of using the technologies or open to learning them (often with support of students!) and connecting the technology tools to literacy practices. Taking new stances requires new attitudes and familiarity with the frameworks we have briefly overviewed (e.g., frameworks in which texts are multimodal representations rather than just print, and reading and writing are socially and culturally embedded practices that can be enabled with digital tools). Prensky’s (2001) characterization of digital natives (the students) and digital immigrants (teachers who did not grow up with the technologies that students use adeptly) is a useful, albeit forced, binary that speaks to stance. Digital immigrants need to be willing to jump into the fray and start to use the technologies that their students know. The practical side of this
immersion is that teachers who use the technologies can understand how these tools enable teaching and learning; the more affective dimension is that the actualizing digital immigrants see the value of the tools and feel good about their own competence in using them.
Resources
Further Reading
Beach, R. (2006). Teachingmedialiteracy.com: A resource guide to links and activities. New
York: Teachers College Press. Available online at teachingmedialiteracy.com.
Burn, A., & Durran, J. (2007). Media literacy in schools: Practice, production and progres-
sion. London: Paul Chapman.
Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (Eds.). (2008). The handbook of research
in new literacies. New York: Erlbaum.
Kist, W. (2005). New literacies in action: Teaching and learning in multiple media. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Websites
—Editlib. The EdITLib Digital
Library is a repository of peer-reviewed and published articles and papers on the
latest research, developments, and applications related to all aspects of educa-
tional technology and e-learning.
—The Assembly on Computers in English is a long-standing
assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English and is a nonprofit orga-
nization of English language arts teachers and teacher-educators dedicated to
intelligent technology integration into the English language arts.
—IRA Focus on Technology: IRA
Programs and Resources is a link to resources of the International Reading
Association site, designed to help educators support students in the new litera-
cies of information and communication technologies, as well as to help teachers
who want to become more proficient in using the technologies. The resources
include publications, online resources, and meetings and events that support
the use of technologies and literacy.
References
Alvermann, D. E., Moon, J. S., & Hagood, M. C. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom: Teaching and researching critical media literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Beach, R., & O’Brien, D. G. (2008). Teaching popular culture texts in the classroom. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear, & D. Leu (Eds.), Handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 775–804). New York: Erlbaum.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural born cyborgs? In J. Brockman (Ed.), The new humanists (pp. 70–77). New York: Barnes & Noble.
Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online reading comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(2), 214–257.
Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (Eds.). (2008). The handbook of research on new literacies. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.
Dubbels, B. R. (2008). Video games, reading and transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (pp. 251–276). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Evans, E., & Po, J. (2007). A break in the transaction: Examining students’ responses to digital texts. Computers and Composition, 24, 56–73.
Foehr, U. G. (2006). Media multitasking among American youth: Prevalence, predictors, and pairings. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Graesser, A. C., Millis, K. K., & Zwaam, R. A. (1997). Discourse comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 163–189.
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Hobbs, R. (2007). Reading the media: Media literacy and high school English. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 773–788). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kist, W. (2005). New literacies in action: Teaching and learning in multiple media. New York: Teachers College Press.
Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2007). A new literacies sampler. New York: Peter Lang.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London, UK: Routledge.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Edward Arnold.
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
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Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Macgill, A. R., & Smith, A. (2007). The use of social media— from blogging to online social networking to creation of all kinds of digital material—is central to many teenagers’ lives. Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project.
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Reading-to-Learn:Â From Print to New Digital Media and New Literacies
Prepared for National Central Regional Educational Laboratory
Learning Point Associates
Submitted February 2003
Evidence for the use of digital media
for traditional academic competencies
David O’Brien
Brock Dubbels
Reading-to-Learn:Â From Print to New Digital Media and New Literacies
Prepared for National Central Regional Educational Laboratory
Learning Point Associates
Submitted February 2003
Evidence for the use of digital media
for traditional academic competencies
David O’Brien
Brock Dubbels
With the current emphasis on accountability and high stakes testing at the elementary level, districts all over the US have an increased awareness of the immediate need to raise reading achievement at all levels. The No Child Left Behind law of 2001 has formally defined the expectations for students and teachers of students in grades K-3 in raising achievement and provided financial assistance in carrying out the provisions of the law (e.g. Reading First provision; see the law at (http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/107-110.pdf).  However, secondary teachers work daily with adolescents who have already “been left behind‖students who are unmotivated, disengaged, and lack the skills and strategies needed in dealing with increasingly difficult content area texts. Secondary teachers, unlike their elementary counterparts, have few resources for dealing with these students, even though this need has been well documented (Alvermann, 2001; Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999).
To complicate matters, as the field of content area reading has given way to the broader, more dynamic fields of content area literacy, and adolescent literacy (Bean, 2001) much of the university supported work in long-term staff development focusing on reading has tapered off or is in transformation (Stewart & O’Brien, 2002, 2003). Before the increased national focus on reading, secondary teachers were under some pressure to teach reading in support of students’ learning content, and learning content area reading assessment and instruction, including strategies, was one way to improve their teaching of content.
With the new focus on school-wide and district-wide reading performance secondary teachers, in whose classes students spend most of their time, are now under increasing pressure to improve students reading performance, sometimes irrespective of content. Our ongoing work with urban and suburban districts in the Twin Cities area confirms this. In essence, the content reading focus of the past three decades has partially shifted from teaching reading to help students learn content to teaching content to help raise reading achievement.
We, and others in the field of content reading have documented the problems associated with putting the responsibility of teaching reading on the shoulders of content area teachers who feel ill-equipped in their professional educations and lacking in time and other resources to take on what they believe is another burden (O’Brien, Moje, & Stewart, 2001). Content teachers are justified in this concern.
To this point, we have outlined what we believe is a considerable problem for secondary teachers and administrators. But this is only the part of the problem tied to national policy that has shifted to states and districts. The other problem is reflected in the increasing disconnect between this policy and adolescents’ changing literacy practices and needs. Primary among these is adolescents’ shifting preference from print text to digital media texts. In the remainder of the paper, we will outline what the shift entails and make the case that teachers can actually capitalize on the shift to improve their students facility with print literacy and digital literacy while learning content in the emerging field of New Literacies (Lankshear & Noble, 2003).
From Print to Digital Media
At present, print text still predominates in school classrooms and single textbooks are still the most popular form of organizing and presenting curricula. But reading in school is more unlike the reading students are doing outside of school than at any point in recent academic history of secondary schools.  And high stakes, print-based assessments are tapping skills and strategies that are increasing unlike those that adolescents (and their younger peers, for that matter) use from day to day. For example, students are turning more and more toward the internet as their primary “textbook†(Lenhart, Simon, & Graziano, 2001, available at http://www.pewInternet.org). In the Lenhart et al. study, funded by the Pew Internet and American Life Project , 71% of students claimed that the Internet is their primary source of information for completing school assignments. This study reported that the majority of adolescents, 78% between the ages of 12 and 17, regularly go online. The number is likely increasing daily.
The Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored study, Kids & Media @ The New Millennium, sampled more than 3,000 children and adolescents ranging from 2-18 years old, including more than 600 participants who completed detailed media use diaries. Among other compelling findings, the researchers found that American youth spend more time with media than with any single activity other than sleeping (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, & Brodie, 1999, available at: http://www.kff.org/content/1999/1535/pressreleasefinal.doc.html).
This research should not be interpreted to mean that children and adolescents are becoming alliterate. That is, contrary to reports in the popular press, they are not reading less even though they have the ability to read. Rather, they are actually reading more, including reading more related to school work. However, they are reading differently. They are reading digital texts, digital media, and using the internet to access information (O’Brien, 2003c).  There are positive reasons for capitalizing on students’ shift to digital literacies–ways that address the print domination of public policy that privileges print-based reading as well as addressing what appears to be the decreasing motivation and engagement of students confronted with school-based texts.
The Advantages of Using Digital Media
Over the last 7 or 8 years, our school-based colleagues have posed numerous questions about this apparent shift to digital literacies. We have synthesized the questions for purposes of this discussion: (a) What are legitimate digital media texts, constructed or imported into school? (b) How do these texts help learners construct meaning and understand concepts better than print text alone? (c) Do the motivational and engaging qualities of work with digital media texts improve adolescents’ performance with print literacy?
To begin the discussion of these issues we will refer to a six-year project that David was involved in with “at-risk†high school students. Those who want to read about this project in more depth can refer to print sources (O’Brien, 1998; O’Brien, Springs, & Stith, 2001) and online sources (O’Brien, 2001 available at: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/obrien/index.html ; 2003, available at: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=obrien2/index.hml
Digital Literacies in Action:Â The Jeff High School Literacy Lab Project
Over the period of six years, David worked with colleagues Rebecca Springs and Dave Stith, both reading teachers at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Indiana, to plan and implement an innovative literacy program using digital media. The primary goal of the three educators was to engage the most unmotivated, disengaged students in the high school while significantly improving their reading achievement.
The students they worked with were students who struggled the most with reading in the school of 2300 students—students representing about the lowest 10% of performance on the state-mandated standardized reading subtests. After studying research and reading testimonials about innovative programs nationwide for “at-risk†or struggllng learners over the summer before they started with their first group of students, the team summarized the existing research and constructed some tenets on which to base the innovative instruction they were interested in.
From reviewing the research and reading about successful programs they concluded the following: (a) effective programs include less skills instruction, which actually detracts from the time students spend reading and improving their ability and more opportunities to read; (b) traditional print materials specifically designed for reading classes such as “high interest, low vocabulary†paperbacks, skill series, and other leveled collections are actually unmotivating because these have been tagged early by students as uninteresting and irrelevant; and (c) the most significantly neglected aspect of working with struggling adolescent readers is reinstating their feelings of confidence and self-efficacy, not just working on skills and strategies.
Based on the review of research and successful programs, the Jeff high team formulated some specific goals for the students. They wanted a program that would maximize the amount of reading and writing the students did while motivating them and sustaining their interest. They also wanted the students to have a wide range of activities to choose from and to ground their reading and writing in their lives outside of school and in their popular culture.
David, Dave, and Rebecca turned to digital media tools and a curriculum that was organized around inquiry projects in which student selected topics within broad guidelines. The students were required to engage in inquiry using both print and other media. They had to plan a way to represent their inquiry projects using print and other media, for example in multimedia presentations or web sites. Most importantly, they had to formulate personally relevant goals in which they accomplished something they deemed important other than merely showing their facility in using the inquiry process and learning the technology tools.  To demonstrate how this worked we will discuss briefly one inquiry project discussed in more detail in the sources cites above.
The Violence Project
In this inquiry project, students chose a topic to explore how violence in the media impacts adolescents. The violence project arose out of a national concern in the early to mid 90s that media producers and companies were not responsibly policing themselves and that violence in the media portrayed and condoned activities and attitudes that were detrimental to children and adolescents. At the time the project was constructed, there were a number of core pieces in the media about the need for the popular entertainment industry to better monitor the potentially detrimental effects of its productions.
The violence project showed the clear advantages of bridging traditional print literacies and digital media (O’Brien, Springs, & Stith, 2001). The students were required to use media to show how media defined, portrayed, and amplified violence that impacted adolescents. In essence, it was a critical media literacy project (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Alvermann & Hagood, 2002) in which media in its multiple content and distribution forms, was used by the students to critique itself. The media texts the students drew from in the projects were among the most immediate and relevant in their lives. Hence, the students were engagement because of choice of topics and relevance—the violence in the media was something that the students lived daily and the media they critiqued were familiar.
For example, one group of students was interested in film. They went to the library and on the internet to do research and found a USA Today article entitled, “Taking Aim at TV Violence–Lawmakers tell Industry: Clean up act” (October, 1993). In the piece, Janet Reno, commented on the Touchstone film, The Program, that included a scene in which intoxicated teens in the film lay down in the middle of a highway and traffic passed harmlessly over him. When teens in Pennsylvania mimicked the film and tried a similar tactic, one was killed and the other injured. Touchstone edited that scene out of the film. In the article, Reno also noted an episode of Beavis and Butt-head in which they start a fire and the scene is subsequently blamed in an incident in which a five-year-old copied the episode and started a fire that killed his sister.
The group of Literacy Lab students read the newspaper piece for critical information about the broad media project; they had a discussion about the piece and split off into pairs who decided on different foci. One pair focused on the The Program segment; two other pairs focused on Beavis and Butt-Head–one on the fire episode, another constructed a classification rubric from another piece they reviewed a variety of episodes and classified different types of violence displayed in the series.
The group that chose to work on the film idea decided that they wanted to depend more on visual “text†than print. They storyboarded an idea in which they scanned juxtaposed images of Michael Shingledecker, the high school student from Pennsylvania who was killed. First, they scanned an image from the newpaper article of his high school yearbook photo. They discussed what they wanted to show–a young student with his future ahead of him, smiling with optimism. Then they scanned an image of some of grieving friends–the stark, cold, contrast of this hopeful life taken away. The simple, descriptive text they wrote attributed the powerful feelings conjured from the pictures to the film that Michael watched, mimicked, and allegedly as a result, died. Their goal was to show a young life wasted by capitalizing on visual media.
One of the pairs who chose violence types in Beavis and Butt-Head set up a screening station and viewed repeatedly segments of videotape that they and their peers brought into the Literacy Lab. They discussed what they were seeing and jotted down descriptions of the segments. They tabulated different types of violence in a table and digitized the video segments that represented those categories. They wrote descriptions to accompany the video clips. The other Beavis and Butt-Head group found more information about the fire that was allegedly connected to kids watching an episode of series.
What we Learned From the Literacy Lab?
In the six years of continuing to modify the program as we worked with struggling learners, we found that adolescents who have been disengaged for years were coming to class, working enthusiastically, and improving in reading. The students who engaged the most in inquiry projects—that is, students who attended the lab and met the goals they set for themselves in their individual contracts, improved the most on both standardized subtests (the ISTEP state mandated tests and the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Tests) as well as in informal inventories and other authentic assessments we constructed. They also had more positive perceptions about themselves as readers and learned about a range of topics.
Although there is little systematic data collected in depth nationally to support the value of using digital media to improve print literacy, we are confident in responding the questions posed earlier based on the study with reference to the Jeff Literacy Lab project.
(a) What are legitimate digital media texts, constructed or imported into school? We learned that in order to engage today’s adolescents, most of whom are inundated with sophisticated approaches to get and hold their attention (King and O’Brien, 2002; Lankshear & Knobel, 2002, 2003), they need opportunities to engage with media that they enjoy and topics that are important to them. As teachers, we need to develop a new tolerance for the media that kids enjoy; we also need to participate more in the media experiences our students enjoy in order to learn about what they find interesting and to share some common interests with them in the same media texts. This includes music, videos, and video games. Right now, as we work with high school students and  teachers who work with them, we listen to the music adolescents enjoy, watch films they recommend, and we play the video games that appeal to them. We strongly encourage their teachers to do the same.
(b) How do these texts help learners construct meaning and understand concepts better than print text alone. The texts that often engage adolescents the most are digital media texts in which print may be one component—at times, a minor component. A phenomenon we observed and confirmed with systematic data collection in the literacy lab is that visual media are often serve as the hook that gets students engaged in topics of study in the first place. Once engaged, it is easier to get them to read and write as part of a larger media project.  For example, one student, Dan, who appears in most of what we have written about the Jeff Literacy Lab, scanned in album covers and watched video clips of Ozzie Osbourne, the Heavy Metal artist now popular in his co-starring role on an MTV “reality†show about his family. Through systematically looking at the scanned album covers, arranged in chronological order, and watching video clips of Ozzie’s music and interviews, Dan came up with topic for a documentary in which he wrote a narrative that he read into an audio file that accompanied still digital photos and video clips. Without the visual media, it would have been much more challenging to ever engage Dan in reading and writing involving print text.
(c) Do the motivational and engaging qualities of work with digital media texts improve adolescents’ performance with print literacy? First, we learned that working with computers and related technologies is a given with today’s adolescents; they do it regularly, proficiently, and automatically and it is not a novel experience. Working with computers and related technologies is not, in and of itself, particularly engaging or motivating. More than ten years ago, that may have been the case, but not now. We discovered that what was motivating about work with digital media was the fact that it was a conduit to the students’ lives in the mediasphere (O’Brien 2001, Rushkoff, 1996)—life in the familiar and comfortable world of popular media outside of school in which so much of kids’ identity is constructed. A second draw was that it allowed them to attain proficiency using media production tools that even their academic placement peers did not have or could use no better than they. The Literacy Lab students gained confidence and competence in an academic setting for the first time in years. Finally, because they formulated relevant goals related to inquiry projects, they engaged daily in something in which they realized progress, saw creations unfold, and looked forward to continuing the work. This engagement, accompanied by relevant goals, self-efficacy, and attribution of their efforts to tangible outcomes, led to more confidence and perseverance and more reading and writing over time, which, we believe, led to proficiency in print literacy. Quite simply, engaging in digital media projects–topics chosen by the students who were excited about using new tools and seeing projects unfold, spurred the purposes and motivation and engagement that caused them to read and write more; and, as result of this new commitment and practice over time, they improved.  In addition to our more local evidence, there are research syntheses and emerging research paradigms that point to the advantages of using digital media in content area instruction? Some of these show direct improvements in student achievement and motivation.  Â
For example, Hobbs and Frost (2003) investigated whether teaching with and about multimedia would improve student reading and writing (available at:  http://puck.ingentaselect.com/vl=17556242/cl=63/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ini=ira&reqidx=/cw/ira/00340553/v38n3/s2/p330 They conducted a study of an 11th grade English/Media class wherein the curriculum emphasized the analysis of media messages within broader social and cultural contexts and issues about the role of the media in society and the lives of individuals.
The researchers studied whether students’ reading and writing performance improved after taking part in the year-long program. They designed the curriculum with accompanying assessments that tapped not only improvements in reading and writing skills but looked at whether the student’s abilities to critically analyze media messages improved as compared to a carefully selected matched control group. The researchers found that students who took part in the media literacy curriculum, when assessed on ability to identify main ideas in written, audio, and visual media, showed statistically significant improvement in comparison to the control group in writing quality and quantity, and an improvement in text analysis skills like identification of purpose, point of view, construction techniques, and the ability to identify omitted information.
Similarly, The Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology, (CARET) (available at: http://caret.iste.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=evidence&answerID=61 posted a response to this question: How can technology be used to improve basicreading skills? In responding with a synthesis from work by Xin & Rieth, (2001), they concluded that multimedia and video technologies can improve reading comprehension and vocabulary for diverse learners in a variety of settings.
The reviews at CARET also support the notion that using multimedia and internet communication technology in the classroom with appropriate pedagogy and teacher preparation in authentic inquiry improves motivation, attitude, and interest when students used applications to produce, demonstrate, and share their work with peers, teachers, and parents (See Bracewell et al. at http://www.tact.fse.ulaval.ca/ang/html/review98.html; Means et al., 1997, available at http://www.sri.com/policy/ctl/assets/images/y2_full.pdf ).
The exciting implication of our work in the Literacy Lab and related work is that it should be generalizable across the content areas. And, it has the potential to improve digital literacies, print literacies, and content learning at the same time. As we reflect on this work, three issues come to mind in comparing it with the older pedagogy in teaching and teacher education in the print-only era of content area reading.
First, digital media texts not only provide broader representations of ideas that have been limited by the linear structure of print, they represent limitless, creative ways of connecting the forms of representation (e.g., print with video, audio narration with pictures or video, print with accompanying audio narration and 360 degree virtual photos) (Calvert, 2001). As the Literacy Lab project clearly showed, many, if not most of the texts with the most appeal to adolescent learners are digital media texts rooted in popular culture, and the adolescents who read these texts are seldom duped by them and the marketing behind them. Rather, they are critical, intelligent consumers who also help to shape the media culture and the media that are directed at them (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Alvermann & Hagood, 2002).
Second, in the era of print-only content area reading, textbooks and other printed media were the focus of attention. The new focus on adolescent literacy , as part of literacy in “New Times†(Luke & Elkins, 1998) makes a stronger case for focusing more on learners, It means paying attention to who adolescents are, (Moje, 2002) and to what engages them (O’Brien, 2003a). Content teachers must now attend to how their students learn in both real and virtual spaces as they go from textbooks to the internet and back (O’Brien, 2003b).
Third, the field of content area reading was constructed largely around cognitive processing perspectives on comprehension of print text and models of information processing and characteristics of texts (e.g., Pearson & Barr, 1984; Singer & Ruddell, 1976, 1985). Instructional frameworks and accompanying strategies based on these theoretical perspectives and models remain popular but are inadequate in addressing adolescents’ digital literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003).
What are Some Instructional Implications for Content Area Teachers?
The terms media, multimedia or hypermedia usually refer to using various ways to extend how we have typically conveyed meaning with print. The use of these media forms such as images, video and audio clips and web pages, allows for more dynamic representation of, and navigation through, information than possible with print text only. Since children and adolescents are learning and practicing digital literacy tools on their own, or within family contexts (Sefton-Green & Buckingham, 1998) it is incumbent upon educators to get up to speed and facilitate students’ experiences with digital media in school.
The literacy practices necessary to read and write digital media present new challenges and almost endless opportunities. However, as of yet, these practices are little understood and they are constantly emerging and changing (Leu, 2000, 2002; Livingstone, 2002). It is not practical to wait to start an instructional agenda using digital media texts until they reach some stable, measurable form and solid research base because they will continue change. Clearly we are in a transitional period, and we need to capitalize on emerging practices and see how instruction emerges and evolves with these practices.
We hope that new technologies will transform learning—indeed, we write frequently about a multitude of teaching and learning innovations based on emerging technologies. However, as educators, we fear that the same technologies will undermine our authority and control over content. In the case of schools, the fear and moral panic that Livingstone (2002) discusses often win out over innovation. Educators often fear their students’ attraction to popular media texts, texts that are central to adolescents’ identity construction, because these texts exploit generational differences to promote values that often contradict those of teachers and schools.
For example, a colleague and I facilitated a middle school staff development program on reading and writing in the content areas in which we used the Violence Project discussed earlier as an example of how to engage struggling adolescents in reading and writing. The particular example we used was the project in which the students catalogued and described different types of violence in Beavis and Butt-Head. In spite of our enthusiasm about how the inquiry project had dramatically improved the kids’ literacy engagement and achievement, one of the staff members attending the session said, “Well that’s, great, but if kids brought that Beavis and Butthead stuff into my class, I would puke!â€
The generational and professional disdain for the two TV characters, who are rude and defy authority, including the authority of teachers, illustrates what we don’t like about the popular media that kids like. We fail to exploit the engaging power of popular media in school because of our dislike for what the media embody, in spite of how the media can engage kids in reading and writing across the disciplines.
Two aspects of digital media are instructionally compelling. First, digital media give you the flexibility to use multiple forms for representing complex concepts and to juxtapose them in multiple ways. The sophisticated tools that enable multimedia production make it an increasingly easier task. You may choose written directions with an accompanying graphic; you might choose a graphic with an audio explanation of its parts; you might choose a video clip demonstrating something with print text to label components or to explain what the audience is seeing. The combinations of these are endless.
Second, with very high quality video and audio, in addition to print, the notion of text, until recently, synonymous with print, can now be easily expanded to include a range of media texts.  Print is only one form of text—the “older†conception predominant before the New Literacies and media texts are more powerful and versatile than print alone (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003).
The high school students David worked with on the Beavis and Butt-Head project knew every episode of the series, frame by frame; they could recite each character’s lines, they spent hours discussing episodes that they liked but didn’t include in the project. These struggling readers were engaged. Think of how much adolescents know about and interact with peers about popular media texts like film, video games, television shows and ads and music artists; talk to them about what they watch on TV and DvDs, or which X-Box© or PlayStation© games they like. Compare their interest and engagement with these visual media with their engagement in school texts (Gee, 2003).
In this transitional period, print remains an important component of the emerging intertextual learning community. The transition means moving from print-only pedagogy to pedagogy involving print plus other media with many of the instructional advantages and tenets and print-dependent pedagogy intact or adapted and refashioned (Myers & Beach, 2001; Leu 2000).
Understanding New Readers and Digital Media Texts in the Content Areas
If we acknowledge that the Internet is the new textbook, we need to dramatically rethink the role of text as defined in traditional content reading instruction. Within the realm of print literacy, content reading specialists have worked with teachers in various content areas to define the characteristics that made each subject area text genre unique and challenging. The key question was, What is particularly crucial to helping kids read their social studies book, their literature anthologies, and their math texts? That question has been typically answered by helping teachers understand text structures, facilitating how they connected students’ background knowledge to the topic under study, and teaching vocabulary important to understanding the text. Content area reading instruction has also involved teaching students how to use embedded text aids and features (table of contents, glossary, marginal gloss, in-text vocabulary keys). In short, content area reading has required instruction from responsive teachers who could help kids cope with their content area textbooks.
Since the New Text is neither a single text nor a print text, much of the time-tested print literacy frameworks prominent in the fields of content area reading and content literacy no longer apply. The new text is not “found” in one place like a textbook. Rather it is constructed by the New Readers as they search for information and link information. In short, the New Readers of the New Text are all creating different texts as they do assignments because no two readers, among the masses of learners free to roam the sometimes millions of web pages on a topic, construct the same text in the end.
To give another example, in an inquiry project, middle school students under the direction of a social studies teacher and a literacy teacher who collaboratively constructed a curriculum, did research on an urban neighborhood. The students did research on the web, they visited the neighborhood, taking digital photos, mapping blocks, and interviewing residents and business people who work in the neighborhood. The students, within their community of inquiry (Beach & Myers, Beach & Bruce, 2002; Bruce & Bishop, 2002) jointly constructed the inquiry text which is represented on web sites, in PowerPoint presentations, and in a special fair held at the school gym in poster sessions in which all of these media were used to showcase the work to the rest of the school and the community (O’Brien & Beach, 2003).  The New Readers in the digital world are honing skills with print. Contrary to some fears expressed by people in the campaign against “alliteracy” kids are reading more, not less, when it comes to schoolwork—as we noted above, they are just reading differently (O’Brien, 2003c).
Digital Literacy in the Content Areas:Â Current and Possible Practices
In this section, we present some literacy practices with implications for content learning that students are already engaged in, with or without instructional support. We also present some ideas that have already captured the interest of teachers across the disciplines.  Finally, we suggest some existing technologies that are, as of yet, little used I schools but have great potential.
1. Searching the web for information: Depending on the level of sophistication at using search engines, kids enter terms that they believe will net information. In the thousands of pages that come up, they may decide how to read them critically to see if they contain information they need, or if they are authored by credible sources; in this skimming for quality, they may go back to refine the search terms. The converse of this critical process, usually in response to assignments where they have limited interest or few personally relevant goals, is that students quickly download whatever they get and paste it into their homework assignments.
Without clear purposes, strategies for critical evaluation, or guidance and structure in assignments, adolescent learners may get lost in virtual text space by following links from the pages that are listed in the search until they forget which pages came up originally. For an interesting, current look at successfully using search engines, including those specifically designed for kids, see the May 27 2003 issue of PC magazine (available at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1046311,00.asp
2. Participating in a collaborative project online. Via instant messaging (IM), users have instant, live, text-based discussions with multiple peers. A group of students can work together to synthesize information for a report. While each is reading the same homework text, working on the same assignment, students “talk” to each other about what they have found, evaluate the importance of the information, share interpretations about what it means and, ultimately, decide what to put in the final synthesis. For example, AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM), an IM platform popular with adolescents, provides a live onscreen chat window showing participating members. Each user can enable single or multiple sessions and the IM operates in the background while students work on a project. Many students already use IM while doing homework (McCampbell, 2001).
The use of IM contributes to cooperative learning communities outside of school. The relatively new literacy practice, a sort of hopping or toggling from window to window, allows New Readers to rapidly read multiple texts, in different genres, change to conversation about what they are reading, transforming oral text into IM code to abbreviate their messages. As teaches, we often discourage IM because we view it as a distraction.  Instead, we need to use it, see how it works, understand how kids use it, and figure out ways to incorporate it into assignments.
- Engaging in inquiry projects using multimedia authoring tools and producing multimedia texts. The classic “report†format of a printed project is being quickly replaced by multimedia forms of the types discussed already in which students choose topics and select ways to best represent the topics. This emerging writing competency not only redefines writing space but engages students in writing with a more complex sense of who the audience is (e.g., see the discussion of Blogs later), how they react to various media, and what they might choose in a hypertext environment with links to optional routes of inquiry. A good source for exploring the inquiry process, constructing inquiry units, looking at examples of existing inquiry projects, and engaging in conversations about inquiry can be found at the Inquiry Page web site hosted by the Inquiry Group at the University of Illinois (http://inquiry.uiuc.edu/) . A compelling argument for using hyperlinks and hypermedia authoring to extend response to print texts, is Jamie Myers’s web page showing the value of using hyperlinks and hypermedia in presenting a critical argument, or providing an interpretation, providing a visual or audio file, or linking to other texts and websites where related ideas can be connected. Myers’s page is at http://www.ed.psu.edu/k-12/culture/.
- Digital video production. Many students are already proficient with tools like iMovie©. The creation of imovies can be a powerful method to bring together ideas of inquiry, analysis, and production so that students begin to gain insights into the ways that the “reality†of the screen can be generated and ways in which digital media texts can augment or surpass print texts in representing ideas. Some good links include an introduction to the mechanics of production at Making iMovies Awsome: http://www.dvcreators.net/awesomeimovies/, http://www.cyberfilmschool.com/, and the Cyber Film School site: http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/lessons/editing/index.html .
- WebQuests. A WebQuest, according to the developers, Bernie Dodge and Tom March, (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html) is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are an excellent way to bring together, reading, writing, critical thinking, technology, and presentation skills. A web site that provides an historical overview of how the approach started in 1995 and some links to excellent resources on organizing and faciltting webquests, including a webquest on webquests at various grade levels, can be found at http://webquest.sdsu.edu/materials.htm . WebQuests are designed to use learners’ time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners’ thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Some examples are in the area of language arts are posted at http://www.teach-nology.com/teachers/lesson_plans/computing/web_quests/language/ , An extensive list of webquests at various developmental level across content disciplines and be found at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virgina at http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/edis771/webquests/directory_of_webquests.html
- Web Logs or “Blogs†are online journals that can be used for posting ideas and getting feedback from the world, or even just a select few from a classroom group. Blogs can turn anyone into a published author who explores a wide range of topics with a range of readers and critics. As in the case of our own and colleagues’ work with media authoring, we can attest that students writing via Blogs or other digital forms is often more engaging reading for their peers than commercially produced textbooks or other texts.  Resources for what Blogs are and how to get started Blogging can be found at http://www.weblogg-ed.com/, http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6774, and http://www.lights.com/weblogs/definitions.html.
- MOOS: Originally an online home for the Dungeons and Dragons game, developed for multi-users on the Internet, MOOs are now popular in education.  There are hundreds of these virtual spaces, and they extend beyond simple Chat, which many students are familiar with. Many MOOs are adaptable to the needs of a specific group (e.g., a class) to allow for such virtual reality features as blackboards, slide projectors, and discussions. In moving beyond simple text-based Internet Relay Chat (IRT) they provide much more flexible, rich environments in which students can write, play, and experiment. One of the educational advantages is that they allow the creation of online communities of students from across geographical areas in real time. Hence, MOOS are particularly important to engagement in literacy practices like reading and writing since they are text-based. And they are compelling in their capacity to engage students who may be reluctant to engage in local texts in classrooms but enjoy being part of broader virtual community of peers. In a typical example of a MOO, a student enters and is presented with a scenario with which they need to respond. The scenario is generally a text description where the player navigates through possible worlds. For more information on MOOs see http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html and http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/~rachel/moolist/edu.html . We also encourage you to view a wonderful virtual environment based on the novel Brave New World: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~r1rozema/Fun/ . A popular MOOs resource for teachers who want to create virtual classrooms is Tapped In, at http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin/ .
- Video games.  As most teachers of adolescents know, video games are engaging to a range of learners. Many game producers offer free demonstrations of their games, many of which are available for free download off of the web. Although the downloads are not complete versions of the games, they provide versions of the game that enable one to examine each game’s design structure, goals and graphics. One resource for free game demonstration downloads is http://www.megagames.com/index.html.
Video games have quickly become the most popular form of media in the world, and as we noted, games have features that capture the attention of the most easily distracted adolescents for long periods of time. As we stated earlier, teachers who want to capitalizing on the design features of video games that may be used in classrooms should play them. One way to approach the task is to critically evaluate them as one would a movie, profession, cultural issue, or practice. There are many that have been created based on novels: Alice, from Alice in Wonderland; Harry Potter, from the popular series from J.K. Rowling; the Lord of the Rings has also inspired a video game. One might ask how the book is represented as a virtual environment, and what assumptions were made when the designers created these interactive virtual environments.
Further, there are many other games that target issues like the social dynamics of how societies are created: the Civilization series is a good example, and worth playing. There are also games that look at science like the forensic science game based on the popular televison series, CSI;Â the Sims series has a wide range of creative applications across disciplines. A nice resource for investigating the possibilities of using games in education can be found at the Education Arcade, http://www.educationarcade.org/.
- [BRD1] Digital audio tools for supporting reading of struggling or disengaged learners. For years, we have recommended to teachers who must use difficult print texts that are inaccessible by struggling students that they incorporate audio-taped recordings of the texts struggling students are required to read. For those who haven’t tried it, it is still very practical and effective to have more competent readers make audio-taped recordings that can be used by less competent peers who are reading those texts. One step toward digitization of the audio is to use the digital recording option on most computers, some of which even have built in microphones. The digital audio texts can be organized and stored in accessible folders by book, chapters within books, or topics of study.Â
The next step is to use the most current digital technologies involving highly compressed audio files. For example, we use digital recorders that produce a format called .dss that is very clear and is 12 times smaller than comparable .mp3 files, the standard format for listening to digital music.  This means that large amounts of audio data, supporting the print text versions studied by students in various disciplines, can be stored, managed by database mangers, and called up by students who require or like another medium to help them read difficult text. A physical tape library that used to take up a large section of shelf space, and used tapes that had to be rewound, and painstakenly forwarded or repeatedly rewound to find certain sections of audio, is replaced by a much more powerful digital system stored on drives or other media. With a .dss library, the player software can be added to any computer free (for example see .dss player lite produced by Olympus at http://cf.olympus-europa.com/consumer/voice/downloads/dss_lite.cfm ). Additionally using these audio tools, students can create a digital audio file that they can use to add into other projects, for example, a PowerPoint presentation that allows for the telling of a story or voice-over narration. What we like about the compressed audio formats is that they play on Mp3 players, or Mp3-like devices or PDAs that kids consider be cool tools—this means less stigma attached to using audio text support. And listening to the oral reading of a competent reader helps less competent readers follow a the text in a way that may bolster understanding (Garner and Bochna, 2001).  Another exciting development is that more and more commercially produced print texts are available in audio form such as standard cassette, audio CDs and even mp3. One of the most sophisticated technologies is a format produced by Audible.com (http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp ) which includes an ever- growing library of popular fiction, nonfiction, newspapers, even other periodicals and NPR programs in a highly compressed audio format that plays on some mp3 players, PDAs, Apple iPods. The market for these audio files is the growing number of people with hectic schedules who “read†while commuting and exercising. But, for teachers who want to explore digital media for the popular text trade as an alternative to, or in support of print text, this is a promising technology.
Digital Literacy Practices Sponsored by Professional Organizations in Content Areas
These are some exemplars among thousands I use to show how professional organizations are evolving to make better use of digital literacies. I recommend that you explore the links in the professional organizations Web sites and search for classroom sites that exemplify some practices that might hold merit in your own classrooms.
Social studies. The National Council for the Social Studies http://databank.ncss.org/search.php?query=texts&type=all&mode=search
Sponsors Inforgettable.net http://infogettable.net/ described as a “humanistic learning community†website with an online schoolbook called Guide to the Past. Once users log on they can comment on the texts with a discussion forum that can be opened for each section and the forum encourages critique. Such online communities, organized around a primary text, introduce the option for extending the text through a myriad of voices from the community. The new text is the discourse community—not a single printed text but a dynamic text structured by the members who engage in constant reconstruction of the text over time. This model, which serves a professional development tool for teachers, is a good one to use with students who have the opportunity in these learning communities to read and write critically, practices they don’t typically engage in with single textbooks in class.
Sciences.   The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Teacher Resources section http://www.nsta.org/resources offers one example of the new online “textbook†which they describe as Videodiscovery, a “comprehensive multimedia database that includes material supporting geology and earth science. One section called Understanding Earth, the organization notes, “offers thousands of images, nearly an hour of full-motion video, and lesson plans covering all the subjects addressed in a yearlong course.â€Â You can log on and use it if you are a current member of NSTA. This is good example of a text in this transitional period—instead of print on paper, it is digital, visually oriented, and online—and, ironically, at this time when kids are navigating to synthesize their own online texts, the Videodiscovery database, which includes pictures, computer animations, and videos, is for teachers rather than students. It is transitional because it relies on digital media to enrich representation concepts but it still content within the control of teacher.
Math. The National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM)’s Illuminations site http://illuminations.nctm.org/imath/index.html
includes “i-Math Investigations†which are online, interactive, multimedia math investigations. These investigations explain concepts and show “hands-on†examples that are virtual manipulatives. As transitional texts, these online investigations combine print exposition with dynamic visuals that enable learning by trying out possible solutions.
Conclusions
The evidence of Internet use and habits indicates that New Readers view the New Text, the Internet and the multimedia texts they construct, as more engaging and interesting than their school texts, but their interest and engagement in digital media is mediated by their interest and choice in constructing texts that are interesting to them.
It is imperative in exploring new digital literacy frameworks for content learning that we capitalize on aspects of the New Textbook that kids already find engaging when we structure assignments for them. A negative example would be to assign reading online instead of using the class textbook. The implied purpose is that students read primarily to be accountable and the content might be on the test. These purposes for reading textbook pages transposed to online reading will not produce more engagement.
Another negative instructional frame is to define an inquiry topic in a restricted way and tell students to find out more about it by using the Internet. In this case, students will simply use the Internet as a more efficient way of getting information, downloading it, and turning it in (Roger Stewart, personal communication, May 6, 2003). Before the Internet, if students were not invested in an inquiry topic, they copied text from print reference tools like encyclopedias to get done. Now they have a tool to more quickly dispose of uninteresting assignments. It is more crucial than every that assignments be personally relevant and engaging.
New instructional frameworks for digital literacy in the content areas must rely more on students’ curiosity, choice in topics and tasks, and critical exploration of sources. For example, an inquiry project in which kids narrow topics from a broadly defined area, selection of print and media sources using some critical analysis of the quality of the sources, and the final selection of multiple ways to represent what one has learned (media reports, web pages, electronic presentations) will result in much more engagement. The key question that, as of yet, remains unanswered in this relatively new area of inquiry is what sorts of skill and strategies are required for the new Readers to be successful? We are all learning as we venture forth, but it is imperative that we do venture forth to think about the digital literacy practices that kids are already engaged in so that we may bridge the digital disconnect between their practices and the work we assign them in school.
References
Alvermann, D. E. (2001). Effective literacy instruction for adolescents. Executive summary and paper commissioned by the National Reading Conference. Athens, GA: University of Georgia.
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VIDEO GAMES, READING , AND TRANSMEDIAL COMPREHENSION.
Games represent a high interest accessible medium to build comprehension, and in using games we can continue to engage in topics that are complex, provocative and motivating, and not often found in texts designed to be simplified for the sake of decoding. Games will also help to get these students to reconnect with reading and learning, and create a basis for developing and using comprehension strategies. With this in mind, this knowledge and experience of theory can provide an opportunity for educators to bootstrap traditional print-based literacy and engage students in comprehension development.
Brock Dubbels
The University of Minnesota
The Center for Cognitive Sciences
305 Elliott Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 747-0346
(612) 626-7253
Abstract: In this qualitative study, literacy practices of “struggling†seventh and eighth graders were recorded on videotape as they engaged in both traditional and new literacies practices in an after school video games club. These recordings were analyzed in the context of building comprehension skills with video games. The students struggled with reading and are characterized as unmotivated and disengaged by the school, which may be at the root of their inability to use comprehension strategies. Playing video games is viewed here as a literate practice, and was seen to be more engaging than traditional activities (such as reading school text, writing journals, etc.). The conclusion of this observation makes connections to current research in comprehension and provides a basis for teachers to use games to develop comprehension and learning.
Key Terms: situation, event indexing model, causal integration model, ludic, interaction, comprehension, knowledge act, decoding, agency, engagement, identity, self-monitoring, metacognition, transmedial, walk-through, level-up, button-mashing
This selected excerpt comes from:
Dubbels, B.R. (2008) Video games, reading, and transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.),Reference. Information ScienceHandbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education.
Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage
—Lessons learned about the importance of play in sustaining engagement from a high school “girl gamer†based upon socio- and cultural-cognitive analysis for designing instructional environments to elicit and sustain engagement through identity construction.
Brock Dubbels
The Center for Cognitive Sciences, Reading Education
The University of Minnesota, Department of Curriculum & Instruction,
Abstract
The experience of a successful adolescent learner will be described from the student’s perspective about learning the video game Dance Dance Revolution through selected passages from a phenomenological interview van Manen (1997). The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?†The importance of this question came out of the need for background on how to create an afterschool program that was to use Dance Dance Revolution as an after school activity that might engage adolescents and tweens to become more physically active and reduce the risk of adult obesity, and to increase bone density for these developing young people through playing the game over time. The difficulty of creating this program was the risk that the students would not sustain engagement in the activity, and thus we would not have a viable sample for the bone density adolescent obesity study. Although the phenomenological interview is generally considered a critical social science approach, the interview transcript was also analyzed using methods from critical discourse (Gee, 1992, 1996, 1999; Fairclough, 2007) with a framework developed from Chapman’s (2006) review of engagement, and from: elements of Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1996), Affinity Groups (Gee, 2001), Positive Interdependence (Deutsch 1960; Johnson and Johnson, 1989), and Self-Determination (Ryan and Deci, 2008). These social learning theories are used to explore issues of sustaining engagement through socially distributed reinforcement and to operationalize the ambiguity of identity as a construct into something that might be replicated for designing instruction. Implications of this study include understanding the potential construction of learning environments that motivate and sustain engagement in learning and the importance of identity construction (Buckingham, 2007) for teachers to motivate and engage their students. In addition to the analysis of sustained engagement through the four socio- and cultural-cognitive theories, four major principals were extracted from the operationalized themes into a framework for instructional design techniques and theory for engaging learners for game design, training, and in classroom learning.
Key terms: Dance Dance Revolution, Exergaming, Phenomenology, Identity Construction, Self-Determination Theory, Affinity Groups, Positive Interdependence, Cooperative Learning, Motivation, Engagement, Social Learning, Instructional Design, Rites of Passage, Play, Games, Initiation, Semiotic Domains, Apprenticeship, Transformation.
