ERIC Number: EJ1054417
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Nov
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0022-0663
EISSN: N/A
Human and Automated Assessment of Oral Reading Fluency
Bolaños, Daniel; Cole, Ron A.; Ward, Wayne H.; Tindal, Gerald A.; Hasbrouck, Jan; Schwanenflugel, Paula J.
Journal of Educational Psychology, v105 n4 p1142-1151 Nov 2013
This article describes a comprehensive approach to fully automated assessment of children's oral reading fluency (ORF), one of the most informative and frequently administered measures of children's reading ability. Speech recognition and machine learning techniques are described that model the 3 components of oral reading fluency: word accuracy, reading rate, and expressiveness. These techniques are integrated into a computer program that produces estimates of these components during a child's 1-min reading of a grade-level text. The ability of the program to produce accurate assessments was evaluated on a corpus of 783 one-min recordings of 313 students reading grade-leveled passages without assistance. Established standardized metrics of accuracy and rate (words correct per minute [WCPM]) and expressiveness (National Assessment of Educational Progress Expressiveness scale) were used to compare ORF estimates produced by expert human scorers and automatically generated ratings. Experimental results showed that the proposed techniques produced WCPM scores that were within 3-4 words of human scorers across students in different grade levels and schools. The results also showed that computer-generated ratings of expressive reading agreed with human raters better than the human raters agreed with each other. The results of the study indicate that computer-generated ORF assessments produce an accurate multidimensional estimate of children's oral reading ability that approaches agreement among human scorers. The implications of these results for future research and near term benefits to teachers and students are discussed.
Descriptors: Oral Reading, Reading Fluency, Automation, Accuracy, Reading Rate, Student Evaluation, Reading Tests, Comparative Analysis, Interrater Reliability, Correlation, Classification, Scoring
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Department of Education (ED); National Science Foundation; National Institutes of Health (DHHS)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: National Assessment of Educational Progress
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305B070434; 0733323; R44 HD055028