The incorporation of electronic books (e-books) into the classroom and home of young children has been shown to have positive effects on the acquisition of early literacy skills. Dialogic reading methods, which include interactive conversations between caregiver and child about a story as it is being read, additionally are known to improve skills that lead to improved literacy during the school years. No research to date, however, has examined e-books and dialogic reading when used together. This study examines how using dialogic reading with a child reading an e-book will impact the acquisition of emergent literacy skills, particularly vocabulary knowledge and story recall ability. Twenty-three children aged 3 to 5 took part in a matched pairs experiment that included reading a select e-book four times in which half received a dialogic reading intervention. The children who received the intervention scored significantly higher in the story recall measure of the posttest than those in the control group. No differences were found between the experimental and control groups on the vocabulary measure, although mutual gains were found among both groups from the pretest to the posttest. The results suggest that dialogic reading when incorporated with e-books may improve a child's ability to recall a story. Further, the results indicate that repeated reading of the same e-book may increase vocabulary knowledge.

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the writing literature. Research suggests that higher quality writing is typically associated with decreased levels of text narrativity and readability. Although narrative elements may sometimes be associated with high-quality writing, the majority of research suggests that higher quality writing is associated with decreased levels of text narrativity, and measures of readability in general. One potential explanation for this conflicting evidence lies in the situational influence of text elements on writing quality. In other words, it is possible that the frequency of specific linguistic or rhetorical text elements alone is not consistently indicative of essay quality. Rather, these effects may be largely driven by individual differences in students' ability to leverage the benefits of these elements in appropriate contexts. This dissertation presents the hypothesis that writing proficiency is associated with an individual's flexible use of text properties, rather than simply the consistent use of a particular set of properties. Across three experiments, this dissertation relies on a combination of natural language processing and dynamic methodologies to examine the role of linguistic flexibility in the text production process. Overall, the studies included in this dissertation provide important insights into the role of flexibility in writing skill and develop a strong foundation on which to conduct future research and educational interventions.

Computer-based environments provide a window into the complex and multifaceted learning process. These systems often collect a vast amount of information concerning how users choose to engage and behave within the interface (i.e., click streams, language input, and choices). Researchers have begun to use this information to gain a deeper understanding of users’ cognition, attitudes, and abilities. This dissertation is comprised of two published articles that describe how post-hoc and real-time analyses of trace data provides fine-grained details about how users regulate, process, and approach various learning tasks within computer-based environments. This work aims to go beyond simply understanding users’ skills and abilities, and instead focuses on understanding how users approach various tasks and subsequently using this information in real-time to enhance and personalize the user’s learning experience.

A substantial amount of research demonstrates that preschoolers' phonological awareness skills are a robust predictor of children's later decoding ability. Several investigators examined performance of children with speech sound impairment (SSI), defined as inaccurate production of speech sounds in the absence of any etiology or communication impairment, on phonological awareness tasks. Investigators found that children with SSI scored below their typically developing peers (TD) on phonological awareness tasks. In contrast, others found no differences between groups. It seems likely that differences in findings regarding phonological awareness skills among children with SSI is the fact that there is considerable heterogeneity among children with SSI (i.e., speech errors can either be a phonological or articulation). Phonology is one component of a child's language system and a phonological impairment (SSI-PI) is evident when patterns of deviations of speech sounds are exhibited in a language system. Children with an articulation impairment (SSI-AI) produce speech sound errors that are affected by the movements of the articulators, not sound patterns. The purpose of the study was to examine whether or not children with SSI-PI are at greater risk for acquiring phonological awareness skills than children with SSI-AI. Furthermore, the phonological awareness skills of children with SSI-PI and SSI-AI were compared to those of their typical peers. In addition, the role of executive function as well as the influence of phonological working memory on phonological awareness task performance was examined.

Findings indicate that the SSI-PI group performed more poorly on an assessment of phonological awareness skills than the SSI-AI and TD groups. The SSI-PI group performed significantly more poorly on tasks of executive function and phonological working memory than the TD group. The results of this study support the hypothesis that children with SSI-PI may be more vulnerable to difficulties in reading than children with SSI-AI and children with TD.

Writing is an intricate cognitive and social process that involves the production of texts for the purpose of conveying meaning to others. The importance of lower level cognitive skills and language knowledge during this text production process has been well documented in the literature. However, the role of higher level skills (e.g., metacognition, strategy use, etc.) has been less strongly emphasized. This thesis proposal examines higher level cognitive skills in the context of persuasive essay writing. Specifically, two published manuscripts are presented, which both examine the role of higher level skills in the context of writing. The first manuscript investigates the role of metacognition in the writing process by examining the accuracy and characteristics of students' self-assessments of their essays. The second manuscript takes an individual differences approach and examines whether the higher level cognitive skills commonly associated with reading comprehension are also related to performance on writing tasks. Taken together, these manuscripts point towards a strong role of higher level skills in the writing process and provide a strong foundation on which to develop future research and educational interventions.