Automated Basic Reading Assessment

Through a 2014 contract from the NAEP program at the National Center for Education Statistics and during Phase I (completed in 2016), the team developed a prototype of 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. In a pilot study at the end of Phase I, the researchers tested the prototype with 99 grade school students and four teachers. Results showed Moby.Read generated scores correlated with traditional human-rated oral reading fluency assessments, and that most students indicated preferring Moby.Read to teacher-administered tests.