Digital Reading Materials for Poor Readers? It Depends James Jackson Cindy Okolo

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?