Can a Reading Tutor that Listens use Inter-word Latency to Assess a Student's Reading Ability? - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Can a Reading Tutor that Listens use Inter-word Latency to Assess a Student’s Reading Ability?

P. Jia, Joseph E. Beck, and Jack Mostow
Workshop Paper, ITS '02 Workshop on Creating Valid Diagnostic Assessments, June, 2002

Abstract

This paper describes our use of inter-word latency, the delay before a student speaks a word in the course of reading a sentence aloud, to assess oral reading automatically. The context of our study is a Reading Tutor that uses automated speech recognition to listen to children read aloud. Using data from 58 students in grades 1 through 4, we used inter-word latency to predict scores on external, individually administered, paper-based tests. Correlation between predicted and actual test scores exceeded .7 for fluency, word attack, word identification, word comprehension, and passage comprehension. Compared with paper-based tests, this evaluation method is much cheaper, based on computer-guided oral reading recorded in the course of regular tutor use, and invisible to students. It has the potential to provide continuous assessment of student progress, both to report to teachers and to guide its own tutoring.

BibTeX

@workshop{Jia-2002-8477,
author = {P. Jia and Joseph E. Beck and Jack Mostow},
title = {Can a Reading Tutor that Listens use Inter-word Latency to Assess a Student's Reading Ability?},
booktitle = {Proceedings of ITS '02 Workshop on Creating Valid Diagnostic Assessments},
year = {2002},
month = {June},
}