Digital Reading Materials for Poor Readers? It

Depends

James Jacksonjamesedj@msu.edu

Cindy Okolookolo@msu.edu

It’s no secret: Many of America’s students

have literacy difficulties

Students with disabilities, as a group,

have lowest literacy scores on NAEP

Textbooks remain the primary instructional tool in general education classrooms

• Especially at middle school and high school levels

• (Kamil, 2010)

You can’t learn much from books you can’t read (Allington, 2010)

We know the problem: What’s the solution?

“In your plan, consider how you will adapt the lesson for a student

who can’t read the textbook”

• Undergraduate special education major: “I will let the student listen to the book on his iPhone.”

• Undergraduate special education major: “I will have the student read the textbook on the computer with text to speech.”

• Masters special education major: “The student has a reading disability, so she can access the book through her Bookshare account on her IPad.”

Problem Solved

After all, students with print disabilities are eligible for digital

reading materials as a component of accessible educational

materials (AEM)

And, there are many sources of digital reading materials

• Accessible Materials Providers (such as Bookshare)• Free and commercial• Trade books and textbooks• Computers, mobile devices, all with

text to speech• Operate within many different

operating systems & software programs

But access doesn’t mean students are better

readers

Or that they learn more from text

In and of themselves, digital reading materials

are not the solution to the problems that poor

readers have in learning from text

Digital Text in Context

Barriers to Access

• Not all text starts out digital• To make sure I had timely access, I often had

to scan books/articles myself.• Even documents I received digitally often had

to be remediated

• I am highly technically skilled, and I have access to tools to do remediation• Even so it took a lot of trial and error and work

on my part to make digital text a possibility for me.

Digital Text in K-12

• How easy is it to use?• Perceptions of usefulness and ease-of-use

predict actual use (Chuttur, 2009).

• What is the quality of the digital text?• How consistent is markup across sources?• Does the functionality supported by different

sources meet user needs?

Digital Text in K-12

• How portable are these systems?• Do students have access in the classroom, or

only the computer lab?• Do students have access at home?• Does student process/annotations follow them

across devices and platforms?