Moby.Read: Automated Basic Reading Assessment

Through a 2014 contract from the NAEP program at the National Center for Education Statistics and with SBIR Phase I funding (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. Phase II focused on extending content, including Spanish text, adding more diagnostic scoring, and implementing cloud-based tools for aggregation, review, and management of scored performance samples. After development was completed, researchers conducted a pilot study with 130 grade 4 students to assess the feasibility and usability, fidelity of implementation, and the accuracy of Moby.Read for assessing reading fluency compared to traditional human-scored assessments.