Improving students' academic learning by helping them access text

Conventional methods of addressing the needs of students with print disabilities include text-to-speech services. One major drawback of text-to-speech technologies is that computerized speech simply articulates the same words in a text whereas human voice can convey emotions such as excitement, sadness, fear, or joy. Audiobooks have human narration, but are designed for entertainment and not for teaching word identification, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension to students. This chapter focuses on the 3-year pilot of CRISKids; all CRIS recordings feature human narration. The pilot demonstrated that students who feel competent in their reading and class work tend to be more engaged in classroom routines, spend more time on task and demonstrate greater comprehension of written materials. When more demonstrate these behaviors and skills, teachers are better able to provide meaningful instruction, since less time is spent on issues of classroom management and redirection. Thus, CRISKids impacts not only the students with print disabilities, but all of the students in the classroom.

Citation Key Alias: pop00414