Automatically Assess Children’s Reading Skills

Ornella Mich, Nadia Mana, Roberto Gretter, Marco Matassoni, Daniele Falavigna

Abstract
Assessing reading skills is an important task teachers have to perform at the beginning of a new scholastic year to evaluate the starting level of the class and properly plan next learning activities. Digital tools based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) may be really useful to support teachers in this task, currently very time consuming and prone to human errors. This paper presents a web application for automatically assessing fluency and accuracy of oral reading in children attending Italian primary and lower secondary schools. Our system, based on ASR technology, implements the Cornoldi’s MT battery, which is a well-known Italian test to assess reading skills. The front-end of the system has been designed following the participatory design approach by involving end users from the beginning of the creation process. Teachers may use our system to both test student’s reading skills and monitor their performance over time. In fact, the system offers an effective graphical visualization of the assessment results for both individual students and entire class. The paper also presents the results of a pilot study to evaluate the system usability with teachers.
Anthology ID:
2020.readi-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Núria Gala, Rodrigo Wilkens
Venue:
READI
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
20–26
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.readi-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ornella Mich, Nadia Mana, Roberto Gretter, Marco Matassoni, and Daniele Falavigna. 2020. Automatically Assess Children’s Reading Skills. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI), pages 20–26, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Automatically Assess Children’s Reading Skills (Mich et al., READI 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.readi-1.4.pdf
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