Technology-enhanced reading performance: Defining a research agenda

A child working on the family farm has an unfortu-nate accident with a combine and loses his right arm.Due to the response by the local paramedics and ex-cellent treatment at local medical facilities, the physi-cal wound is treated quickly. However, the trauma,loss, and grief will linger for the child and his family.When the child returns to school, if the childwas right-handed, is it reasonable for his teacher toexpect that he will write his name the same way hedid before the accident? Of course not. His rightarm and hand are no longer available for completingthe simple task of writing his name on his papers. Insituations like this, the child typically receives occu-pational therapy services, where he is taught a varietyof interventions to compensate for the physical limi-tations he may encounter: how to write with his lefthand, how to keyboard with one hand, how to use aspeech recognition system, and how to use a rubberstamp so that he can quickly sign his name. Now, consider a second scenario. A childcomes to school unable to read. Despite the best ef-forts of his teachers, the child is slow to recognize theletters of the alphabet. He has great difficulty inlearning the sounds each letter makes. His knowl-edge of sight words is minimal. He has limited inter-est in looking at books or listening to stories. By thetime the child reaches fourth grade, his reading skillshave advanced to a level equivalent of a mid-yearfirst-grade student. Year after year, the child, his parents and teach-ers have tried new instructional approaches; used avariety of instructional materials; devoted extra timeto reading activities; engaged peer readers to workwith him; and used a host of motivational tech-niques to model, reward, and even coerce him toread. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the child hasnot developed the reading skills that allow him toderive meaning from text with adequate speed, flu-ency, and comprehension. These two scenarios are instructive becausemany educators fail to see any relation between theacademic responses to the challenges each studentexperiences. For example, in the first scenario theynotice the obvious physical impairment demands animmediate response. However, in the second sce-nario, four years have been devoted to teaching achild to read with little evidence of success. We feelno remorse in demanding that certain children readlike their more normally achieving peers, despitehaving years of data to indicate that they cannot dothe task. Finally, we fail to notice the double stan-dard we hold. In the first case, there is little interestin how the child completes the task; the emphasis ison functional performance. In the second case, weinsist that the only way to read is by using the samevisual, perceptual, and cognitive functions as every-one else, despite a plethora of data that points to animpairment in those organic systems.In each of the scenarios presented, it is impor-tant to consider the event that stimulates an inter-vention and associated support services. Such issuesare clear in the first example. However, in the secondscenario, there is no single event that triggers action.Therefore, how long do we continue to provide read-ing instruction when a child is clearly not benefitingfrom it? This point is not meant to suggest that wegive up teaching a child to read. Rather, at whatpoint do we intervene with compensatory strategies,including assistive technology, to enable students tobypass, for example, the decoding aspects of readingthat they have not been able to master in order toengage in the higher order processes of extractingmeaning from text? A fundamental problem for many strugglingreaders, their parents, and their teachers is that thereare few benchmarks to guide decision making aboutusing assistive technology when the nature of a dis-ability is cognitive rather than physical. Given thatthe basic processes associated with reading and com-prehending are cognitive, the field has been caughtunprepared to address issues of how technologycompensates for cognitive impairments (Edyburn,2000, 2003a). Several factors may explain the lack ofattention devoted to assistive technology and reading