Figure 1. Vocabulary screen.
Presented to 5th European Conference for the
Advancement of Assistive Technology
Duesseldorf (Germany). 1-4 December 1999.
http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/FTB/aaate99/welcome.htm
Francisco Alcantud, Rafael Romero, Maria-Celeste Asensi, Antonio Ferrer
Unidad Acceso, University of Valencia, Spain
http://acceso.uv.es
Abstract. A multimedia program, with Internet features has been developed by the University of Valencia for training reading comprehension of deaf students wishing to enter university. The program uses sign language videoclips as an scaffolding for the training process and is based on a sound instructional model. The modular composition of the program, as well as its pedagogical and technical characteristics offer many innovative benefits to the users and instructors.
Diverse studies ([1], [2], [3]) and our own experience at the University of Valencia [4] show that reading comprehension is a deficit area for many deaf students trying to enter university.
To address this problem a reading comprehension course in CD-ROM with some internet features for deaf people has been developed at the University of Valencia as part of a more general HORIZON project for the promotion of disabled people through access to higher education.
Sign language, more familiar to some deaf users, is used as an scaffolding system along the course to assure that new concepts (words and expressions) are correctly comprehended. The sign language video clips are used intensively at the beginning of the program and then diminish progressively its presence so that by the end of the instructional programme, after completing the different phases, the user does not need of this help to understand any kind of text of a pre-university level. However, the course can also be completed without knowing sign language. The program contains also dynamic links to an Internet site for submitting written exercises to the course tutor using web forms.
By the date of compilation of this article (July 1999) the course is being applied in a controlled environment to deaf users with the intermittent presence of the tutor in some of the sessions, to give the initial instructions and to detect possible problems in the implementation. The effectiveness of the system will be evaluated with the application of a pre-test and a post-test about reading comprehension skills to the students. There are 3 consecutive levels in the program. The estimated time for the completion of the 3 program levels by an average user is 100 hours.
The program produces reports about the progress of each students at the end of each working session. These reports can be consulted by the tutor who can then take the appropriate decisions regarding the student progression and provide adequate feedback to the student, complementary to the information obtained directly by the student from the program.
A lot of care has been taken to define the instructional objectives to be attained by the student along the course. A taxonomy of objectives based on a previous work [5] and was defined for this project. There are 134 operational objectives, which are grouped into 19 general objectives. The general objectives are in turn grouped into 3 main instructional areas, namely Morphological-Syntactical, Lexical-Semantical and Pragmatical. In order to make the areas names more significant to the student, these are substituted in the program with more familiar terms of similar meaning: Vocabulary (vocabulario), Sentences (frases) and Understanding (comprensión).
Each of the 2,200 exercises of the course addresses one of the operational objectives
that have been defined and this is made explicit to the students by lighting up the
corresponding instructional area sign in the exercises screen (see figure 2).
The tutor can evaluate the student results and progression for each general objective and
main area through the analysis of the program reports.
Several principles of instructional design and interface design of educational software have been taken into consideration in the development of the application and the definition of its interaction with the student. For example, the sequence of contents is structured according to the principles of increasing complexity, increasing diversity and the training of globally relevant skills.
The program consists in fact on three modules, to be used by three different types of users: the student module, the tutor module and the developer module. At program start a login screen pops up for the user to identify him or herself . There can be as many different students as desired and the program keeps separate records for each of them.
Each time that a new student starts the course, a multimedia tutorial is run so that the student becomes familiarised in advance with the program features and interface. The tutorial explanations appear both in text and sign language videoclips.
1. Content presentation (Contenidos): The course has a selection of 62 texts extracted from real-life written contexts: newspaper articles, fiction and essay books, educational texts... For each text the student can see an image, an introductory text with sign language alternative, the text itself and a selection of vocabulary with text and sign language definitions (see figure 1). Each section can be viewed by pressing the corresponding button.
Figure 1. Vocabulary screen.
2. Off-line exercises (Ejercicios): Each text has an average of 40 exercises related which makes a total of more than 2000 in the whole program. The student has to do them all sequentially. Immediate feedback is given to the student about the result of each exercise. There are different formal types of exercises: choosing the right alternative (figure 2), associating lists of elements and typing the right word in a form field. The student can go to the content area and return to the exercises as often as needed.
Figure 2. Exercises screen.
3. On-line Exercises: at the end of the set of off-line exercises the student can connect to Internet by pressing a button on the screen to do two more exercises that will be sent automatically to the tutor for its correction. The first exercise always is to write a summary of the text (see figure 3). In the second exercise, an inference question specific to the text just completed is asked to the student. The exercises are sent by the web form to the tutor email when the student presses the send button.
Figure 3. Web exercises.
4. Results: in this screen the student can see his/her results in the exercises done so far for the current text, and both the cumulative and detailed results of the previous texts exercises. The figures are shown as totals and also detailed by each of the 3 main instructional areas: Vocabulary, Sentences, Understanding.
The tutor has his own password to access the program. When the tutor logins, a control menu with more options appears on screen. These options allow the tutor to navigate through the contents of the course (texts and exercises) without having to follow the order defined in the original sequence.
There are also some options regarding the management of students. This allows the tutor to change the password, current level, current text or current exercise of any student, should it be necessary.
The most important important option is the possibility for the tutor of revising the student logs and statistics. Firstly, the tutor has access to the log file generated by the program (figure 4), in which all the student actions are recorded sequentially. The time elapsed from the start of text as well as time from previous actions are recorded in the log.
23/06/1999 a las 10:01:38 Inicio de sesión **********************
00:00:01 +00:00:01 Texto 1-1-2 iniciado. --------------------
00:00:07 +00:00:07 Se pulsa botón 'Imagen'.
00:00:12 +00:00:05 Se pulsa botón 'Contenido'.
00:00:22 +00:00:10 Se pulsa botón 'Intro-Texto'.
00:04:46 +00:03:51 Se pulsa botón 'Vocabulario'.
+00:00:08 Mostrar palabra: 'Patriotas'.
+00:00:09 Mostrar palabra: 'Caribe'.
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Figure 4. User log (fragment).
Secondly, the tutor can see many reports about the student progression, with an Access application linked from the main program. These are the reports available: results cumulated by general objectives and main instructional areas, evolution of results for each text and instructional area (see figure 5), vocabulary terms consulted in each text and time used in each of the program sections for each text.
Figure 5. User statistics.
The amount of text and exercises to be introduced in the developing phase was quite numerous: 62 texts, 1,000 definitions terms and videoclips, 2,200 exercises. In order to test that all items were properly coded and referenced into the program the content team people, who were independent from the programmer, had there own interface with specific options.
Different developing tools were used for the distinct parts of the program. The main application was developed using Asymmetrix ToolBook Instructor 5 for Windows 95. The videos for the introduction texts and the vocabulary are stored in AVI files, that were captured and edited using Adobe Premiere 5. All the texts, exercises and vocabulary definitions are stored as TXT files and organised in an structure of folders in the main Content Folder.
The web pages are dynamically generated by the server using ASP technology for showing the corresponding exercise for each text completed, which is extracted from an Access database. The web forms for the online exercises were developed using Microsoft FrontPage 98. The student logs are analysed using Microsoft Access 97.
The modular composition of the program, as well as its pedagogical and technical characteristics, offer many innovative benefits:
We can use sign language as a learning support resource although the CDROM is still a limited device for the storing of video clips. We had to use 4 CDROMs to store all videoclips. In this sense, the new DVD emerging technology will be an interesting solution, but once it is more widely spread between users and their standard multimedia PCs.
The continuous feedback increases the learning autoregulation which is usually a deficit skill in deaf people.
The logs give the tutor the possibility of controlling in a detailed manner the cognitive processes developed by the student: for example, how often the student needs to consult the text again and how long does he/she takes to complete each task. Furthermore, the instructional model offers the framework for a more in-depth analysis of the results and progression of the students along the course.
The developer module easily permits a new instructor to modify the program to include new objectives in the model, and exercises to satisfy them, without the programmer intervention, thus opening the program to future development.
Finally, the networking features mean more benefits. They free the tutor-student relationship from some spatial and temporal restrictions. On the other hand, it makes possible for the tutor to obtain more information than just the usual drill and practice exercises present in most Computer Based Training programs. The web forms permits the tutor to collect all written exercises in an orderly and timely manner and this enriches a lot the evaluation process.
[1] Mies A., 1992. "El léxico escrito en la Comprensión
Lectora: Estudio de un grupo de alumnos sordos profundos preadolescentes", Revista
Logopedia, Foniatría y Audiología. Vol XII, 4, pag. 203-212.
[2] Asensio M. and Carretero M., 1990. "Los procesos de lectura en
los niños sordos". Anuario Español e Iberoamericano de Investigación en Educación
Especial. Madrid, CEPE, pag. 267-332.
[3] Conrad R. 1979. "The deaf schoolchild" Language and
Cognitive Function. Harper and Row. London.
[4] Villalba A. Ferrer A. Asensi C. 1999. "La comprensión lectora
en universitarios con déficit auditivo", en Revista Logopedia, Foniatría y
Audiología. Vol XIX, 1, pag. 33-39.
[5] Alcantud F. Vidal-Abarca E.Gilabert R., 1988. "Un sistema de
instrucción en comprensión lectora para los alumnos del ciclo medio de EGB".
Universitat de València.