Teaching children to read using a computer.

For the past 10 years I have existed in two quite separate worlds. One world is that of an experimental psychologist working in the isolation of a university laboratory on problems of memory and cognition; the other is that of an applied researcher attempting to computerize the instructional process. It would seem that there should be a fair amount of commerce between these two worlds, but I am disappointed to find that very few of my colleagues in memory and learning are aware of the work on computerized instruction, and this situation is equally true for my friends in education. Therefore, this article gives me an ideal opportunity to propagandize a bit for the potential that each of these fields has for the other. This article is primarily descriptive, focusing on work that we have been doing at Stanford in teaching reading to first-, second-, and third-grade children. Let me emphasize, however, that there is a clear link between this work and basic research on memory and cognition. I like to refer to this link as a of By that phrase I do not mean a highly formalized theory, but rather a loose collection of theoretical and empirical facts that can be used in conjunction with educational methods to design optimal procedures for instruction. Having written about the ingredients for a theory of instruction, I will not spend time on that topic here. Simply stated, there are examples in which psychology provides powerful tools for devising optimal procedures, particularly when instruction can be brought under computer control. I will refer to several of these examples, but will discuss only two in detail.