The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

When does taking time to preview a new word before reading a story improve vocabulary and comprehension more than encountering the word in context? To address this question, the 2001-2002 version of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor embedded an automated experiment to compare three types of vocabulary preview -- defining the word, giving a synonym, or just asking about the word -- and a control condition. Outcomes included within-story comprehension as measured by performance on multiple-choice cloze questions, and post-story vocabulary as measured by matching words to their definitions. We analyze results based on thousands of randomized trials.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Project LISTEN

Associated Project(s): Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor

Text Reference

Jack Mostow, Joseph E. Beck, Juliet Bey, Andrew Cuneo, J. Sison, and Brian Tobin, "An Embedded Experiment to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Vocabulary Previews in an Automated Reading Tutor," Tenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Studies of Reading, June, 2003.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Mostow_2003_4660,
   author = "Jack Mostow and Joseph E Beck and Juliet Bey and Andrew Cuneo and J. Sison and Brian Tobin",
   title = "An Embedded Experiment to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Vocabulary Previews in an Automated Reading Tutor",
   booktitle = "Tenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Studies of Reading",
   month = "June",
   year = "2003",
}

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