Training the Tutors: Literacy E-Courses

The purpose of this project is to enhance the quality of literacy tutor training and formulate best practices in e-learning design. Research indicates that in the year 2000, 37 percent of fourth graders were below the "basic" level of skill in reading. Some studies have shown that tutoring can be an effective means for improving children's learning, and that students with well-trained tutors learn more than students with untrained tutors. The researchers in this project are designing and implementing eight tutor-training e-courses based on empirically-tested principles of learning and current knowledge in reading education. They are also embedding experiments in three of the eight e-courses to study specific features of student learning. In one experiment, they are comparing the learning of students who have to manipulate colored icons on the screen in a practice task to that of students who simply have to choose an answer. In a second experiment, the researchers are studying the effects of having students construct answers to pretest questions on how well they do in a later test. In the third experiment, the researchers are testing the hypothesis that students who are warned about a pop quiz learn more than students who are not warned. The research team is putting the web-based learning courses into a digital library called CyberSilo to make the training more widely available. The goal of this project is to develop effective methods of learning in distance education, particularly in the area of cost-effective training of tutors.