Intervention > Evidence Snapshot

Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor
Beginning Reading

As of July 2007 no studies of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor were found that fell within the scope of the Beginning Reading review protocol and met WWC design standards. Therefore, the WWC is unable to draw any research based conclusions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor to improve outcomes in this area.

Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is a tool developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University aimed at improving early literacy for children First through Fourth Grade.1 It is an automated Reading Tutor (RT) that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud. The RT lets children choose from a list of stories from multiple sources, including user-authored stories. RT responses are modeled after expert reading teachers and adapted to fit technological capabilities and limitations. It utilizes speech recognition technology to analyze children’s oral reading and intervenes and provides help when children read incorrectly, encounter difficulty, or click for help.

It is currently not a commercial product, but is utilized by many children who have participated in studies to test its effectiveness. The current version runs under Windows(TM) 2000 or XP on a computer with at least 128MB of memory.

Footnote:

1 Most of the information cited on this page are derived from Carnegie Mellon University’s Project LISTERN website: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~listen/

A group of closely related outcomes.

A summary of the effectiveness of an intervention in an outcome domain, based on the quality of research, the statistical significance of findings, the magnitude of findings, and the consistency of findings across studies.

Effectiveness Rating Key

Positive: strong evidence that intervention had a positive effect on outcomes.

Potentially Positive: evidence that intervention had a positive effect on outcomes with no overriding contrary evidence.

Mixed: evidence that intervention’s effect on outcomes is inconsistent.

No Discernible: no evidence that intervention had an effect on outcomes.

Potentially Negative: evidence that intervention had a negative effect on outcomes with no overriding contrary evidence.

Negative: strong evidence that intervention had a negative effect on outcomes.

For more, please see the WWC Glossary entry for rating of effectiveness.

Evidence Tier

The Department of Education’s evidence tiers. For more information, please see the WWC Glossary entry for evidence tiers.

The percent of each characteristic is based on the sample size of all studies meeting standards that reported data on the characteristic.

Percentages below may not add to 100 percent.

Last Updated: July 2007

Related Resources

WWC Summary of Evidence for Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor

Beginning Reading Evidence Review Protocol

See related studies

This intervention report was prepared for the WWC by American Institutes for Research under contract ED-02-CO-0022.

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