MetaMetrics Extends Partnership With Carnegie Speech, Offering Edtech Companies Technology for Automating PreK-12 Oral Reading Assessments - MetaMetrics Inc.
Skip to main content
Post Category:
International, Lexile

MetaMetrics Extends Partnership With Carnegie Speech, Offering Edtech Companies Technology for Automating PreK-12 Oral Reading Assessments

Carnegie Speech and MetaMetrics Partnership Announcement

Companies can use Carnegie Speech’s patented speech recognition technology and the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading to accurately measure fluency to the phonemic level 

DURHAM, N.C. & PITTSBURGH, PA. –  September 27, 2022 – Today MetaMetrics®, developer of the widely adopted Lexile® Framework, announced an extension of its partnership with Carnegie Speech for automating the evaluation of oral reading fluency for preK-12 students. Carnegie Speech’s spoken English technology is fully integrated with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading, providing edtech companies with a single API for delivering Lexile measures for students’ oral reading abilities.

“For nearly 20 years, our research-based speech technologies have been used to assess spoken language for learners around the globe,” said Angela Kennedy, President and CEO. “Through our technology’s integration with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading, we can collaborate with edtech companies to automate the measurement of oral reading fluency for all learners, providing a measure that will help teachers accelerate their growth.”

Used for decades by leading companies and universities, such as Stanford, Yale and Northwestern, Carnegie Speech’s patented pinpointing technology is able to accurately assess spoken English to the phonemic level for speakers of 63 different languages, not requiring re-engineering for different dialects and accents.

Historically, teachers have used Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) to measure student oral reading ability, but that approach had well-known shortcomings. One issue was that it took significant teacher time to listen to each student read aloud individually, counting the number of words read correctly. Another concern was that differences in passage difficulty were not captured by the traditional WCPM metric. The Lexile oral reading measure takes into account not just WCPM and accuracy, but also the difficulty of the passage read aloud. With the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading and Carnegie Speech’s technology, the time-consuming manual calculation of a student’s oral reading ability is replaced by a voice-enabled approach that’s automated and proven, saving valuable teacher time and providing a scale for measuring student growth.

“The unfinished learning resulting from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic is staggering. The recent NAEP scores showed the largest average score decline in reading in three decades,” said Malbert Smith, CEO and co-founder, MetaMetrics. “It is more important than ever before that teachers have easy-to-use, accurate tools for assessing literacy development, beginning with the youngest learners. Our extended partnership with Carnegie Speech provides edtech companies with proven technology and measures to allow schools to measure student oral reading fluency, regardless of their native language, dialect or accent.”

About Carnegie Speech

Based on commercialized research and a rich body of intellectual property patents from Carnegie Mellon University and the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Speech is the world’s leading organization using speech recognition and text analysis technologies to adapt and advance spoken language and literacy learning, including English as a second language.  Carnegie Speech technologies power Fortune 100, governmental, and educational organizations seeking to optimize their language assessment and training efforts. Visit www.carnegiespeech.com for more information.

About MetaMetrics

MetaMetrics is an award-winning education technology organization that offers the only scientifically valid, universal scales for measuring silent and oral reading and listening (Lexile) and math (Quantile) with plans to develop measures for writing. The Lexile and Quantile Frameworks measure student ability and the complexity of the content they encounter. Lexile and Quantile measures and related technologies link assessment to instruction and provide next steps for students of all ages and abilities. The measures also provide valuable insights about students’ potential for growth. MetaMetrics’ measures, products and services are licensed to dozens of education product companies to help achieve that growth. For 35 years, MetaMetrics’ work has been increasingly recognized for its research-based approach to improving learning. For more information, visit MetaMetricsInc.com.