Thinking Readers

David Dockterman and David Rose--both members of the TIE faculty--have teamed up to design and distribute software that makes literature more accommodating to different kinds of readers. Often middle school students with poor reading skills are presented with dumbed-down literature written at their level. Thinking Reader enables these students to improve their reading skills and to read middle school classics in the original.

David Rose (Ed.D. '76) is co-founder and co-executive director of CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology), a non-profit that focuses on accessibility for all students. Under a research grant, CAST examined how technology could "smarten up" books so that struggling and learning disabled students could read the same literature as their peers. Rose and his colleagues created prototype software that embeds proven reading strategies and scaffolds supports into authentic text. The result, called Thinking Reader, led to measurable improvement in reading comprehension.

David Dockterman (Ed.D. '88) joined Tom Snyder Productions as an HGSE intern in 1982 and never looked back, designing numerous award-winning educational software programs for schools. Now vice-president and editor-in-chief, Dockterman and his Tom Snyder team collaborated with CAST to turn Thinking Reader into a commercial program for the classroom. This effort included market research, a complete technology makeover, and the licensing of classic middle school literature (like Tuck Everlasting and The Giver).

Dockterman and Rose teach TIE courses that reflect their roles on the Thinking Reader project: T-560, Universal Design for Learning (David Rose), and T-522, Educational Software Design (David Dockterman).