The National Center for Research on Literature Teaching and Learning's "Multimedia and Literature Teaching and Learning" project was concerned with doing just that -- with exploring the attributes of multimedia and hypermedia that support response-based practice. The project's first phase was concerned with the development of criteria for considering multimedia/hypermedia software from a response-based perspective, and the application of those criteria to a critical review of commercial applications designed to support literature teaching and learning. The results of that review revealed that, although such programs were of high technical quality and linked to works commonly taught in schools, the pedagogical approaches embodied in them were not, in general, response-based. The project's second phase accordingly involved the development of prototype applications for supporting literature teaching and learning at both the elementary and secondary school levels. Prototypes at both levels were designed to address what seemed to be lacking in commercial software and to meet criteria developed in the project's first phase. The project's third phase involved pilot testing the prototypes in actual classroom settings. The purpose of this final phase was to demonstrate the usefulness of certain kinds of hypermedia tools for supporting response-based teaching and learning in real classroom situations.

This paper reports on all three phases of the "Multimedia and Literature Teaching and Learning" project and presents some preliminary conclusions that can be drawn from it. The first section describes the first phase of the project. It details the development of review criteria and the results of the application of those criteria to a critical survey of commercial multimedia literature applications. In the next two sections, phases two and three are collapsed to describe both the design and pilot-testing of the prototype applications we developed. The second section explains the design of a prototype elementary application, Kidspace, and its pilot testing in six elementary classrooms. The third section is concerned with the design and pilot testing of a secondary/post-secondary application, the Beats. The paper's final section presents preliminary conclusions that can be drawn from the project as a whole and suggestions for future research and development.