Timeline: March 22-24, 2024 (a 40-hour period)
My Role: Project Lead
Many people struggle to understand academic writing. The complicated syntax or topics can be confusing to read, especially for inexperienced readers (e.g high school students).
A-RAT (Academic Reading Assistance Tool) helps these readers increase their familiarity with academic writing and improve their reading comprehension skills.
How might we improve reading comprehension of academic literature in high school students?
Concept creation
Project planning
Leading a team
Research synthesis
Literature review
Brainstorming
Sketching
Wireframing
User flow mapping
Prototyping in Figma
Storytelling
Video Editing/Recording
Professional Writing
Independent reading uses two core skills: decoding individual words and comprehending the text as a whole.
Most readers tend to struggle more with the comprehension skill.
However, reading comprehension is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic. Researchers have found success in improving comprehension with strategy-based approaches like inference teaching.
A-RAT is designed to help readers learn to draw inferences about meaning while reading and engage with other cognitive processes related to comprehension like memory, exposure, and decoding.