The National Institute of Informatics, Information and Systems Research Organization, a university joint-use institution, has six educational programs such as Benesse Corporation and Tokyo Shoseki in order to improve children's "reading ability" and improve the quality of Japanese education. A preparatory council for the "Science Institute for Education" was established in collaboration with companies and organizations.
From 2015, the National Institute of Informatics' Center for Social Sharing Knowledge has a "Reading Skill Test (RST)" that scientifically diagnoses how accurately children can read simple textbook-level documents. And is working on research to identify the factors that cause high and low reading comprehension.
How people read a first-time document consisting of sentences (text) and charts has not been clarified yet, but at least "process text as a symbol string" such as correctly dividing it into phrases. It is thought to include 11 processes such as "understanding the meaning" and "selecting information".
"RST" is designed to check whether the 11 processes are performed correctly, based on the hypothesis that these 11 reading processes support the learner's reading behavior in cooperation with each other.In fact, it is clear that about 6% of the total of 340 students from 5 public junior high schools who took the "RST" could not read the contents of the textbook, and about 2% could not read the basic and superficial reading comprehension. became.
This time, as new reading comprehension findings are gained in research fields such as cognitive science, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, the model of the reading comprehension process will be refined and reflected in the "RST" content.
At the newly established "Science Research Institute for Education" preparatory council through industry-academia collaboration, analysis of the reason "why can't you read" based on the data obtained by "RST", and factors related to the level of reading comprehension By studying specifics, we aim to equip all students with the ability to read textbooks accurately when they graduate from junior high school.
