TERENCE: An Adaptive Learning System for Reasoning about Stories with Poor Comprehenders and their Educators

Text comprehension skills and strategies develop enormously from the age of 7-8 until the age of 11, when children advance as independent readers. Nowadays, more and more young children turn out to be poor (text) comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inferencemaking skills, despite proficiency in word decoding and other low-level cognitive skills. Though there are several pencil-and-paper reading interventions for improving inference-making skills on text, and specifically addressed to poor comprehenders, the design and development of adaptive learning systems for this purpose are lagging behind. The use of more intelligent adaptive learning systems to tailor such interventions to poor comprehenders has a tremendous potential. TERENCE embodies that potential. It is a Collaborative Project funded by the EC under the ICT Call 5 FP7-ICT-2009-5 (1 October 2010-30 September 2013). TERENCE will design and develop an intelligent adaptive learning system. In particular, the system’s smart games will ask children to draw inferences about events of stories, in Italian and in English. Moreover, the system will allow teachers to choose and custom-tailor the types of stories and games according to the needs of their learners. The TERENCE consortium involves European experts in diverse and complementary fields (art and design, computer science, engineering, linguistics, evidence-based medicine, psychology), and sees the constant involvement of the end-users (poor comprehenders and their educators) from schools in the UK and in Italy. The paper overviews the TERENCE project.