Center on Teaching and Learning
Faculty Members:
Gina Biancarosa, Ed.D ginab@uoregon.edu, and Sarah Carlson, Ph.D, carlsons@uoregon.edu
Project Description:
The MOCCA Project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to validate and refine a new measure (MOCCA) for diagnostic purposes in reading comprehension. MOCCA was originally developed to identify the cognitive processes that take place during reading comprehension, and whether such processes are associated with reading comprehension problems in struggling readers. To do so, readers are asked to complete a missing sentence in a short narrative text with the “best” sentence out of four options in the multiple-choice assessment. Each option represents a specific cognitive reading comprehension process that has been identified in previous research (e.g., paraphrase, different inferences). The “best” option completes the text in a causally coherent way so that the goal, subgoal, and resolution causally fit together. Preliminary results from the original development of MOCCA indicate that two types of struggling readers tend to overly-rely on processes that do not help them develop causal coherence during reading when they are not choosing that “best” option. Thus, in the current project, we will expand, test, and validate MOCCA by developing additional items that will range in grades 3-5. Each grade level assessment will have 3 forms and will be piloted each year, including with a nationally representative sample in Years 2 and 3. This is also a multi-site project in which data will be collected in Chico, CA with our partner Ben Seipel, Ph.D., and IRT analyses will be conducted at the University of Minnesota with our partner Mark Davison, Ph.D.
Internship Activities:
Working with a team of researchers to organize and code verbal protocol data, as well as assist in various analyses throughout the project (e.g., identification of comprehension groups based on project data; observation of IRT analyses).
Student Time Commitment:
Negotiable and variable depending on the students needs, interests, and availability.
Skills Needed:
Some practical experience in working with data in a research team.
Keywords:
reading comprehension, assessment, struggling readers, data analysis
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