The Cabrini-Green public housing complex is galaxies away from the home of a guitar-strumming space traveler named Jimi Jupiter, but the diminutive alien has made the long voyage to help young, inner-city earthlings blast off into reading.
Jimi, who, minus the green complexion and antennae, bears a casual resemblance to a 1960s rock musician Jimi Hendrix, exists only on a computer diskette. But don’t tell that to Constance Murray, a bright-eyed kindergartner at Jenner Elementary School, the school cast into the public spotlight last year when 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was struck down by gunfire as he walked from his Cabrini apartment to his 1st-grade class with his mother.
“Hi, Jimi. How you doing?” Constance, 6, asked the talking icon after signing on to her computer-guided reading lesson on a recent day. “Hi, Elvis. And how are you today?” she then inquired of an animated dinosaur craning its long neck from a corner of the computer screen.
Under the watchful eye of a Cabrini parent who is paid $5 an hour to offer help when necessary to each of the 22 children in Jenner’s advanced kindergarten class, Constance is participating in a 3-month-old experiment using a program called “Electric Reading Land.” Its aim is to use the computer’s artificial intelligence to teach economically disadvantaged pupils the phonic skills and other methods they will need to decode the written word.
The pilot project will continue through the spring and is not without controversy in the education community. It is trying to duplicate-at hundreds of dollars savings per pupil-results of the highly successful Reading Recovery program, which involves weeks of intensive one-on-one tutoring.
The nationally acclaimed Reading Recovery format originated almost 15 years ago in New Zealand and was designed to help at-risk 1st graders whose reading and writing skills were in the lowest 20 percent. Now widely used in the United States, the program involves 12 to 14 weeks of one-on-one tutoring and is, on average, more than 90 percent successful in bringing students up to grade level.
It is used in Chicago and the suburbs, from Plainfield in the south to Evanston in the north. School districts often finance the cost of training and staffing teachers in the Reading Recovery program-roughly $3,500 a year per teacher-by using federal Chapter 1 funds earmarked for economically disadvantaged children.
Starting in mid-January, the effectiveness of “Electric Reading Land” will be studied on preschoolers at a day-care center in the Stateway Gardens public housing complex. The expansion of the program, in cooperation with the Center for New Horizons, will focus on boosting the language skills of children as young as 3 years old.
Software for Success, a non-profit organization that has donated the computers and software being used at Jenner, said it plans additional research sites in Evanston and Chicago in 1994, when more software will be introduced.
Seth Weinberger, who has spearheaded the effort at Jenner, said Software for Success’ ultimate goal is to help sponsor implementation of computer-assisted tutored instruction on a national scale in Head Start facilities and kindergarten classrooms, as well as in the home.
The computer program being tested at Jenner would reduce the need for a tutor to about once a week, advocates say, getting more bang for the buck and bringing a greater number of pupils up to grade level.
Weinberger said that by using the computer’s memory, “Electric Reading Land” can closely monitor a beginning reader, and advance the curriculum at the pace set by the needs of the individual pupil. Weinberger said most of the commercial software on the market has only four or fewer levels, and no memory ability to pick up where the pupil left off.
“Can we use the computer to do what a Reading Recovery program does, but reaching more children and at a lower cost?” Weinberger asked. “We say yes.”
Weinberger, a Loop attorney, said: “A 6-year-old at Cabrini is indistinguishable from my kid in Evanston. But most of these children have had very little exposure in the home to the printed word and proper use of language.”
The kids are, however, no strangers to Nintendo and other non-educational games, which at least appears to have provided the Jenner pupils with the facility to quickly master a computer joystick or mouse.
“Find the word that ends in `an,’ as in `fan,’ ” a voice emanating from the personal computer’s speakers instructs D’Angelo Harden, 6, a kindergartner at Jenner. As a picture of a fan is shown on the video screen, D’Angelo guides the mouse to a box labeled “fan” and clicks on the word. A frenzied electric guitar solo lets the boy know he has answered correctly, and D’Angelo smiles broadly. For the next 10 minutes, he continues to enjoy following a story line while being drilled on basic reading skills.
Asked afterward how he performed so well, D’Angelo replied confidently: “Because I know about the sounds.”
“About 70 percent of children in America learn to read without a problem,” said Weinberger, director of Software for Success, whose advisory board of college professors, scientists and school teachers helped develop “Electric Reading Land” along with the Evanston-based software company D.C. True.
“But the remaining 30 percent . . . are the kids we need to reach before they become frustrated with school, drop out emotionally and the window of opportunity slams shut.”
Jenner’s track record appears to affirm Weinberger’s sense of urgency and his belief that early intervention, rather than remediation later on, is the key to success. For example, in the 1993 round of state-mandated student testing, called the Illinois Goal Assessment Program, 3rd graders at Jenner, 1009 N. Cleveland Ave., scored in the bottom 5 percent in reading of all schools in the six-county metropolitan area.
Brooke Prockovic, a kindergarten teacher at Jenner, while acknowledging that she is not a “computer person,” said the project is worth a try.
“This is only one piece of the puzzle, but we need a lot of supplements around here,” she said.
Prockovic said the software “reinforces very much what my program is, which is a blend of whole language, like writing stories, and phonics, which is essential if you are going to be a good reader.”
But in contrast to Prockovic’s guarded enthusiasm, others predict “Electric Reading Land” won’t even come close to producing the results of the Reading Recovery program.
Leon Zalewski, dean of the College of Education at Governors State University in south suburban University Park, said he doubts a computer program can even approximate a teacher’s ability to determine a pupil’s strengths and weaknesses and then build from that point.
“In education, we tend to buy into things that three years later, after some research results are available, we see don’t really work,” said Zalewski, who has helped a number of Chicago area school districts, including in Plainfield and Park Forest, implement a Reading Recovery program.
“Artificial intelligence isn’t the same as asking the computer to think, which it cannot do.”
Zalewski said a computer program, even one that proves superior to the beginning-reader software widely available in computer stores, can only generalize, and that is not good enough.
“I’m afraid what a computer does is put everybody more or less at a certain level. The problem is that the average 1st-grade level in the City of Chicago might be quite different than, say, in Arlington Heights,” he said.
Although Prockovic agreed that a computer cannot replace a teacher, she left open the possibility that “it may prove to be almost as good as a tutor taking four children out of the classroom for individualized instruction. That’s our hope,” she said. “Come back in the spring, and I’ll tell you if it’s been successful.”
