ICARE: Independent Comprehensive Adaptive Reading Evaluation System

ICARE stands for independent, comprehensive, adaptive reading evaluation. The goal is to enable assessment of reading problems for students in schools with minimal attention required by teachers. This goal will be achieved by replacing a human test giver with a virtual evaluator—a lifelike animated computer character that converses with the student to guide him or her through the assessment procedure. Tests will be scored by the computer using mouse-clicked choices or speech recognition while measuring response times. Any test that depends on speech recognition will also have a version that depends instead on mouse-clicked responses. ICARE is comprehensive because it will identify problems in word reading or comprehension and in the major component processes that appear to be causing the problem for a particular child. ICARE will also flag unusual patterns of responses and suggest further appropriate evaluation by speech therapists or school psychologists (for language comprehension beyond two standard deviations below grade level or for patterns suggesting possible attention problems, such as scoring higher on reading than listening comprehension). Finally, ICARE is adaptive in the specific sequence of tests for each student, which depends on their performance on previous tests. The logic behind the adaptive sequences is informed by both theory and scientifically based reading research and it will be tested and validated or modified during the course of the project.