Purpose: In a prior SBIR project, the team developed Moby.Read, a tablet-based speech recognition app for grade school students to self-administer oral-reading fluency assessments. In this project, the team will fully develop a component that uses natural language processing to assess and then recommend specific activities to improve oral reading. Significant reading problems must be detected and addressed early to keep all students on track. However, in-person oral reading fluency assessments are time-consuming, expensive, or often unavailable, and not provide actionable guidance on how student to improve oral reading. Project Activities: In Phase I in 2020, the team developed a prototype of a natural language processing software that rates students' oral reading fluency and generates personalized instructional activities to improve oral reading. Pilot research at the end of Phase I with 165 students in grades one to four demonstrated that the prototype functioned as expected, that students were able to complete one oral reading task independently, and that the prototype generated diagnostic and formative information to students on their strengths and areas to improve their oral reading. The 11-months of the Phase II project focused on creating more passages and fully developing the formative assessment mechanism that recommends personalized practice activities for students based on their level of oral reading fluency. On April 1, 2022, Google acquired the Intellectual Property rights for Moby.Read and SkillCheck in order to integrate these technologies within their suite of educational products. AMI did not conduct any further research on SkillCheck as had been planned. AMI will continue as a small business and is honoring school contracts that use Moby.Read and SkillCheck until 2024. Product: Through a 2014 contract from the NAEP program at the National Center for Education Statistics and during an ED SBIR award completed in 2019, the team developed Moby.Read, a tablet-based app where grade school students read a passage aloud and the speech-recognition software generates an assessment of oral-reading fluency in real-time. This project will develop SkillCheck, a component to add to Moby.Read. Employing natural language processing software, SkillCheck will analyze recordings of oral reading renditions of text passages and produce interactive report pages that rate and illustrate the student's basic reading skills as analyzed from recorded read-aloud performances. SkillCheck will then present strengths and weaknesses and recommend practice activities appropriate for the level of individual students. A reporting dashboard will provide teachers information on student progress.
