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Dan : Welcome to the Full Circle Resource Kit Podcast. In today's interview we are focusing on students' online reading comprehension. Our guest is Dr. Mary McNabb who has just published a book called Literacy Learning in Networked Classrooms: Using the Internet with Middle-Level Students.

Mary has been researching and evaluating classroom practices related to technology for more than 10 years. Here she is to explore with us what happens when students read on the Internet.

What are the problems that you have noticed as you have been observing students when they are reading online?

Mary: One of the things that I have noticed is that the structure of the Internet, which is fundamentally hypertext, changes the reading process. It changes the reading path. And the kinds of things that we do when we are reading hypertext are different from when we read a narrative print. And as a result, some students may encounter that it requires more mental energy to focus on creating a personal rhetorical structure while they are reading. It requires engagement in critical analysis of information. There's also a time factor associated with reading online. We don't necessarily have to pay that much attention to when we are reading print. When we are online, we might have a limited amount of time but we also - our attention span may be different because we may only want to spend thirty seconds attending to one link on a page and then click on another link. And so, reading efficiently as well as comprehending effectively, becomes important.

We have to make decisions while we are reading online about what we are going to give our attention to and decisions about things that we are not going to give our attention to. It actually takes a lot more active working memory:
- we have to remember where we located information;
- we might need to backtrack to revisit information;
- we might need to jump to a URL or a Web site address to do a keyword search.

All of these things we are holding in active working memory while we are reading online which we don't do when we are reading a narrative in the same way.

We also, reading online requires synthesis of multiple perspectives and multiple information resources. We have to create our own narrative. And in a book the author creates a narrative for us and connects information and synthesizes through explanation. And we do that in our heads now when we are reading online. And some kids, they don't have that sophisticated capacity yet and so teachers need to be developing higher-order reading skills for online comprehension.

Dan : For one, it sounds like reading online is a lot more complex than reading text.

Mary: Appears to be, ya.

Dan :  And, if a student is a good reader in the print world, are there any predictors of whether they will be able to do equally as well in the online world or is it a completely different skill set.

Mary: It's not completely different. There are additional skills and there is not a lot of research. We don't have a national empirical research agenda that is being funded to answer that question, although it should be because teachers are doing trial-and-error, and a lot of people are sitting kids down to use the Internet during school time and not necessarily getting effective use out of it because they may not be reading well online.

But from what I have observed, students need good, sound reading skills going into the Internet and then the Internet challenges students to develop higher order skills, such as, synthesis of multiple perspectives, creating a narrative in your head as you are reading. Use of keywords is really important. Teachers can develop methods for helping students increase their reading comprehension online but they need to be strategic about it.

Dan : What advice would you give to teachers who are spending time with their students at a computer?

Mary: Students who are reading online need to be prompted to keep a reading focus and a purpose in mind. Because you are creating your own narrative, you are an individual reader. There is no teacher that I have seen that is capable, we don't have the capacity to track everything students are reading online because it is reader-driven. Whereas, a narrative in a textbook is put together by curriculum committees and editors with expertise in content areas. They decide what students are going to read.

When we go online even if we give students a jumping off place - a list of URLs to investigate - they can easily maneuver beyond that. You might give them a reading assignment, something to focus on while they are reading, but we are all naturally going to follow our own interests.

Dan :  And the Internet is great for that, right! (laughing)

Mary: The Internet is great for that. So teachers need to be prompting those interests you know to have some curricular applicability.

Dan: Have you seen anything related to webquests? I mean, that seems to be what webquests are trying to do in getting students to start with a certain set of resources and answer some questions.

Mary: Ya, webquests are good for that. But still even, teachers have to be real strategic about what resources they select. You know a very narrowly focused topic and you can look at all kinds of perspectives around that topic rather than having a very large topic and having kids all over the place - you're not going to be able to understand if they are comprehending or not.

You can have reading circles go online and do research and then come back and debrief and print out what they read and bring it back to a table where you debrief in small groups or as a whole group to see what kids are understanding about what they find online.

Dan : What are teachers doing for assessing students' online reading comprehension?

Mary: Now that's an area of weakness. There aren't good assessments out there - very few. For the most part I see teachers paying attention to designing the online reading assignments and they will set up the time for the students to do the online reading but they are not necessarily monitoring how and what students are reading online.

Teachers need to be able to have the students generate something tangible about their online reading comprehension so they can look at it and see if kids are comprehending - if they are not, to follow up with feedback to improve that. Looking at developing a purpose while you are reading, maybe taking notes, maybe cutting and pasting important information and writing about it in your own words - what does it mean, things like that.

Dan :  With the advent of blogging, would that be a tool that might be useful for this kind of an activity?

Mary: Definitely, you could sign up parents or reading tutors from the community to come in and blog with kids on more of an individualized basis or small group so that there is that feedback and monitoring of asking kids comprehension questions and seeing if they are really comprehending. And having somebody read the same thing the kids are reading to make sure that kids are actually understanding.

Dan : That's fascinating because what we have seen is a lot of new tools on the Internet that allow kids to be producers - you know they can put up photos, they can put together presentations. What I hear you calling the education community to do is to actually use some of those tools in a slightly different way that comes back to the metacognitive skills and the critical thinking - and using those tools to actually demonstrate what is being learned rather than a brain dump, if you will, you know, here's what I think about this topic.

Mary: It's very easy for kids to cut and paste. It doesn't mean that they're understanding it. So, you can let them cut and paste pictures and snippets of information but having write their interpretation of it or do a Think Aloud or a retelling about what it is the meaning that they are making from what they are seeing online is where you are going to be able to make their comprehension visible and find out whether or not it is on target.

Dan : Great, well thanks so much for sharing your insights. We appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

Mary: Thank you, Dan.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy