Research

Here you can explore a growing list of online resources related to research in the area of literacy and technology integration.

 * [|Case Technologies to Enhance Literacy Learning] - This project used knowledge about best practices of early literacy education to target improvements in teacher education and young children's literacy achievement. Case-based, anchored instruction using high speed, streaming video over the Internet and in CD/DVD-ROM provided a new model for pre-service teacher education, making visible the richness and complexity of best practice instruction to teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and classroom teachers. An extensive set of studies will use the digital, multimedia resources available at our site to study the use of a case-based approach to pre-service teacher education. We plan to accomplish three central objectives: (a) raise pre-service teachers' understanding of best practices of early literacy education; (b) increase pre-service teachers' use of best practices in the classroom when they first begin teaching; and (c) significantly raise young children's reading achievement.
 * [|The Evolving Definition of Literacy] - This website, created by Annette Lamb, outlines several different definitions of literacy that are impacted by new technologies such as the Internet.
 * [|Teaching Internet Comprehension to Adolescents (TICA) Research Project] - Efforts will focus on seventh grade rural South Carolina and urban Connecticut school districts with typically low-achieving readers who are most at risk of dropping out of school. Through an integrated sequence of studies, team members will develop a research-based adaptation of reciprocal teaching to support these students in acquiring the challenging, higher-level comprehension skills the Internet demands. The research will focus on increasing students’ ability to identify important problems and then locate, critically evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information as they go about solving those problems online. This project will provide the research base to help prepare students for the reading and information demands of the 21st century.