Concordia’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance taps into online technology to enlighten young minds
photos by Mimi Zhou
Above and below: Pre-school students testing ABRACADABRA at Concordia’s CSLP labs.
At Hillcrest Academy in Laval, Que., first graders cheer when Mrs. Tsimiklis says ABRACADABRA— even though it has nothing to do with magic. An acronym for “A Balanced Reading Approach for CAnadians Designed to Achieve Best Results for All,” the web-based literacy resource is the brainchild of individuals at Concordia’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP). ABRACADABRA uses animated characters and games to foster literacy skills in children.
Grade 1 student Jonathan D’Annessa says he likes ABRA’s dragon the best: “He has fire coming out of his mouth and flies all over the computer screen,” D’Annessa says. Jonathan clicks on the dragon to find out what unfamiliar words mean.
Another first-grader, Oreanthi Moutouridis, prefers the tool’s hockey game. “If you answer a question about a story right, you get to shoot a puck at the net,” Moutouridis says.
ABRA is chock full of digital stories and related exercises. “Each activity is designed to work on one of the four major skills and 32 sub-skills identified by the [United States] National Reading Panel to allow children to become good readers at the beginner level,” says Philip Abrami, CSLP director and professor of Education. “Everything we develop is based on the research evidence for best learning.”
Teacher Irene Tsimiklis has been using ABRA in her Grade 1 and 2 classes for two years. “My students love it,” Tsimiklis says. “No one is ever bored.” They are especially drawn to each animated character’s unique skill. “One is good at reading; another in writing,” she says. The puppets known as the Speedsters are the most popular. “They teach reading pace. If I give my students a choice, they always choose the read-o-metre game to find out if they’re reading too fast or slow.”
Engaging children to read is an important educational and social challenge. Research indicates students who can’t read fluently by Grade 3 have fewer chances of being successful at school and in the job market. One in four teenagers aged 15 to 16 in Canada reads below the standard established by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The rate soars to 40 percent if you add adults to the mix.
“If we could increase adult literacy by just one per cent, Statistics Canada estimates we would add $18.4 billion to our economy annually,” says Abrami. “Early intervention—helping children before they experience difficulty or their learning problems are locked in—works much better than later strategies.”
The CSLP, which was established at Concordia in 1988, aims to research and develop learning resources for elementary and high-school students and teachers. The centre is a hub for professors and graduate students from Concordia’s Education and Psychology departments, as well as specialists from other Canadian and American universities and CEGEPs who collaborate on various educational projects.
The centre has embraced the enormous potential of online technology with its Learning Toolkit, which features two components: ABRA and ePEARL (Electronic Portfolio Encouraging Active Reflective Learning), both of which are designed to improve students’ independent learning processes. Another component, known as ISIS-21 (Inquiry Strategies for the Information Society in the 21st Century), will assist in conducting research through the internet after it’s launched. With the outside funding it’s able to attract, the CSLP can research, develop and make these learning tools available for free on the internet. As a result, students at schools with limited resources can benefit from these programs as well.
ABRA’s reading wizardry
ABRACADABRA builds on earlier literacy programs the CSLP developed for American schools. “We needed something more flexible in Canada because elementary and high-school learning is a provincial responsibility with different curricula across the country,” Abrami explains.
In creating ABRA, the CSLP sought the active participation of administrators, teachers, literacy experts and information technology consultants from across Canada. In short, an instructional design team integrated the program’s requirements into storyboards that programmers and graphic artists developed into software. “But it’s not quite that linear,” Abrami quickly adds. “There’s a lot of back and forth. If a tool doesn’t look or work right or our research evidence doesn’t support its success, we redesign it.”
Activities related to letter-sound correspondence help youngsters prepare for reading. Questions that include “What do you think will happen next?” test a more advanced reader’s comprehension. Other activities develop writing skills or spelling abilities. ABRA users are introduced early on to varied reading genres by choosing fiction (including fairy tales), non-fiction and poetry. They can follow along as a story is read out loud or they can read on their own and click on a word if they need help pronouncing it. Another component facilitates a teacher’s monitoring of each student’s progress and tailors activities to individual needs.
ABRA is also linked to ePEARL, a multimedia storage container. “ePEARL’s ability to record a child’s reading is very powerful. This is the age of authentic assessment,” Abrami says. “And you can see a child’s pride when his parents hear the progress he’s made over a school year.”
Second-year results of a long-term study underscore ABRA’s effectiveness. Research involving more than 400 students indicates ABRA users made significant improvements in letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness and word reading when compared with children who didn’t use this resource.
All the English school boards in Quebec, as well as some French ones, have installed ABRA. The Université du Québec à Montréal is helping to create a French-language version. ABRA is also being used across Canada, in Australia and the United Kingdom. While the complete version has to be stored on a local server, most features can be accessed at abralite.concordia.ca
ePEARL: a multimedia gem
Screenshots of the early-childhood education Learning Toolkit
The second Learning Toolkit component, ePEARL, helps students plan, implement and later reflect on school assignments in a bilingual environment. Its purpose is to encourage students to approach self-regulated learning projects and/or self-study with a stated goal and detailed strategies so they can achieve their objective. Research shows that, over time, ePEARL improves overall performance in a subject area.
Online prompts help students begin projects and organize them within electronic file folders. This allows students to work on each assignment in manageable portions.
Level I instills a goal-setting habit into Grade 1 and 2 students who are juggling reading, writing and numeracy projects. ePEARL’s link to ABRA helps youngsters set their own literacy goals.
Older elementary and high-school students can personalize the homepage of the Level II and III editions by entering a title and writing a description for each project, as well as the motivation, goals and strategies needed for its completion. The description helps teachers know whether instructions and criteria have been understood.
Screenshots of the early-childhood education Learning Toolkit
ePEARL allows classmates, teachers and parents to make comments while a project is still a work in progress. “Getting students to accept regular feedback and peer evaluation and use it constructively is a tremendous life skill,” Abrami says.
CSLP Manager and Information Specialist Anne Wade says ePEARL gives students who don’t excel at a particular subject a chance to showcase their ideas and creativity. “You see kids beaming with pride when they share their projects with their parents or classmates,” Wade says. “The emphasis is on the learning process, not a final product.”
The final phase has students evaluate how well each of their strategies worked and whether they achieved their goals. Students also assess their management of time and resources and identify what they would do differently in future.
At the end of the year, students pick the projects that best reflect their learning progress in different subjects, explain their choices and insert them into a presentation folder. “This folder serves as an archive of a student’s progress and can be carried to the next level,” says Wade.
The CSLP designed ePEARL in partnership with the Leading English Education and Resource Network and with advice and input from English and French language-arts consultants and teachers. “Our ultimate goal is to have every child in Canada use ePEARL. But we’re still a long way from there,” Abrami says.
Over the next three years, the CSLP will continue to research how effectively ePEARL improves literacy and other creative skills in a bid to fine tune the resource.
Creating ISIS magic
CSLP is also developing ISIS-21, a Toolkit component to make students, teachers, school librarians and parents savvier when using the internet for any type of research.
There’s definitely a need for this resource. “A survey of Ontario university professors in April found that first-year students rely too heavily on Wikipedia,” Abrami says. “Many students aren’t taught proper inquiry, retrieval and critical-thinking skills because the curriculum for educating teachers is lagging behind rapidly changing technology.”
A $100,000 grant from Inukshuk Wireless has facilitated the development of a prototype that is linked to ePEARL. The ISIS process begins with students asking a question to be researched. “When you properly articulate a query, it becomes clearer what kind of information you’ll need,” Wade says. Additional brainstorming determines other relevant questions.
“Once you’ve identified the kind of information you need, the next step is to determine where to get it,” she says. “This is not about doing a quick Google search but identifying the best possible sources, perhaps books, government statistics and reports, or information from relevant organizations and experts.”
ISIS-21 will prompt students to come up with a sequence of key words that makes their online search concise and logical. It will also urge them to verify the reliability and relevance of websites.
“Most sites aren’t vetted or edited the way encyclopedias and books have been,” Wade says. “So it’s essential for students to become critical users of web-based resources and to learn how to compare and contrast information, draw their own conclusions and synthesize what they’ve learned to form new knowledge with the proper credit given to sources. Otherwise, many will continue to cut and paste stuff they’ve hardly read from the first few sites that pop up.”
ISIS-21 is being tested in a few English Montreal School Board classrooms and in the Foothills School Division in southern Alberta. More funding is needed to fully research and develop the software and make it widely available.
With the Quebec government curtailing support for research and mobilization projects in education, securing much-needed funding is a challenge. “And this is happening just when we could be making a huge difference,” Abrami laments.
He adds that, despite financial shortages, ideas on how to expand the Learning Toolkit are in full supply. For example, the CSLP is collaborating with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto to integrate arts education into ePEARL. Still, Abrami says he would like to develop tools for numeracy skills, science and social studies, too. “On top of that, we lack reading tools for older students,” he points out.
In keeping with its philosophy of helping schools that can least afford technological resources, the CSLP hopes funding agencies and others realize the vast benefits these projects could bring to students in inner cities and remote communities.
Julie Gedeon, BA 99, BA 01, MA 09, is a Montreal-based journalist.
For more information on the CSLP, visit doe.concordia.ca/cslp
