Connect-IT Development and Innovation Project

Development and Innovation Study

Connect-IT was designed to provide intervention, as well as frequent and interleaved practice for the types of inferences that are critical for making sense of narrative and expository text. These include text-connecting inferences (pronoun reference, inferring the meaning of new words from context, connecting ideas within text) and knowledge-to-text inferences, all inferences that struggling middle school readers find difficult to make.

To address the need for enhanced reading comprehension skills in secondary students, we proposed a series of integrated research studies:

Our Aims:

1. To fully develop a teacher-delivered instructional program (Connect-IT-Teacher) to enhance inference-making as a means of improving overall text comprehension for middle school students with or at risk for reading comprehension disability

2. To fully develop a technology-based version of the program using the same content and procedures (Connect-IT-Computer)

3. To conduct a small experimental Pilot Study in year 3 comparing Connect-IT-Teacher and Connect-IT-Computer interventions to each other and to a business-as-usual (BaU) control (school-provided remedial literacy instruction) to document the feasibility, usability, and promise of both Connect-IT interventions.

  

The findings from the pilot RCT were promising and we will be following up by conducting an initial efficacy study (see Connect-IT Efficacy).