A-RAT: Academic Reading Assistant Tool

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  A-RAT's homepage.

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  A-RAT user dashboard. Includes pinned files and recently viewed files.

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  A-RAT reading page. There's a paper outline on the left, a way to go back to dashboard, and a button to go to the summary activity

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  A-RAT section summary activity. Users drag words to fill in the blanks. They automatically move onto the next section once it's completed

Problem Space

Many people struggle to understand academic writing. For proof, see the many articles surrounding this topic, and the Plain Writing Act of 2010 focusing on governmental writing specifically. In many papers, the complicated syntax or the complex topics being discussed can be confusing and overwhelming to read, especially for inexperienced readers, especially high school students. A-RAT (Academic Reading Assistance Tool) helps the user become more familiar with academic writing and improve their reading comprehension skills. By creating A-RAT, we also hope to make academic writing more accessible to people who might have an interest in reading about different topics found in academia, but aren’t used to reading the complicated language in most papers. A-RAT can also be a tool for high school and early college students making the transition towards reading more academic papers. These students often struggle at first to learn to read this type of writing.

How does A-RAT solve this problem?

When being an independent reader (i. e. understanding this paragraph), there are two core skills in play: decoding individual words and comprehending the text. If someone is struggling with being an independent reader, they are most likely struggling with comprehension. In our research, we discovered that reading comprehension is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic that still has yet to be completely understood. While there are no concrete be-all end-all solutions, researchers have found success with aiding comprehension by using strategy-based approaches like inference teaching. Research has also shown that those with low reading comprehension skills do not look back on previous parts of the text as often. A-RAT is designed to help readers draw inferences more often while reading and to improve other cognitive processes related to comprehension like memory, exposure, and decoding.

First demo link: interactive prototype Second link: Figma boards with research, ideation process, and final high-fidelity screens

Built With

• bootstrap
• figjam
• figma