Contract Closed

Online Oral Phonological Awareness Assessment

NCER

Program: Small Business Innovation Research

Award amount: $200,000

Project director: Tyler Borek

Awardee:

Literably

Year: 2021

Project type:

Phase I Development

Contract number: 91990021C0024

Purpose

In prior research and development, the company developed Literably, a student administered oral reading fluency assessment that automatically generates scores across key domains as students read aloud. The research team will develop a new prototype to assess early grade school students' phonological awareness, their ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. The prototype will prompt students to complete a phonological awareness task by reading aloud into a device, and after the human transcription and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine will score the student's oral responses.

Project Activities

At the end of Phase I, in a pilot study with 20 grade one to three school educators and 400 students, the researchers will examine whether the prototype functions as intended, the ease of students self-administering the assessments, the accuracy of the results of the assessment, and whether educators believe the tasks were age-appropriate and that the scores could be used to inform instruction.