Five key takeaways from our webinar hosted by experts from MetaMetrics, Inc. and SoapBox Labs
We recently announced a new partnership with Soapbox Labs, provider of specialist speech recognition technology for kids, to automate the evaluation of oral reading fluency with the Lexile Oral Reading Framework for students preK-12 using voice-enabled assessments. The dynamic feedback loop offered by the SoapBox voice engine also allows young students’ proficiency to be benchmarked more regularly, giving teachers better data and insights to help even the youngest learners build foundational reading skills.
To really dig into this topic, we invited Dr. Amelia Kelly, VP of Speech Technology at SoapBox Labs, to join our own Dr. Alistair Van Moere, Chief Product Officer, in conversation during a live webinar on April 19, 2022. Here are five key insights from the discussion:
- Voice technology can have the most impact when used to assist teachers and enhance student learning. Voice tech, when built into edtech products and assessments, can remove the time educators need to manually grade and score assessments so that they can focus on personalizing their instruction to the students who need the most support.
- The Lexile Oral Reading Framework provides a scale to measure reading fluency, building upon Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) and accuracy scores. WCPM and accuracy scores are often used to determine how well a student can read; however, neither take into account the difficulty of the passage being read nor are they on a scale that can provide information about growth over time. The Lexile oral reading measure solves this problem.
- Training speech models on a diverse and representative dataset is important for equity and inclusion, and validation research to ensure bias doesn’t exist is key. SoapBox prides itself on offering clients a voice engine that mitigates bias across accents and dialects and will soon release research to expand upon, and provide evidence of, their leadership in the market in this area.
- Read aloud passages used for assessment follow a special recipe that is different from practice passages used in the classroom. Assessment passages are short and avoid things like repetition, dialogue and names. Forthcoming MetaMetrics research using NWEA MAP Reading Fluency data shows that these carefully crafted passages only need to take about a minute to read to accurately assess reading fluency.
- The future of voice technology in assessment is focused on supporting teachers by offering them an automated, informal, invisible and scalable approach to oral reading assessments. The data generated by voice-enabled tools will also become an integrated part of classroom activity informing how teachers instruct struggling students. Not only can voice technology assess a student’s ability to read aloud, it also has applications in language learning, math and science, dyslexia screening and other K-12 use cases.
Q&As from the Webinar
There was a lot of interest and questions about voice tech and assessment during the webinar. More than we could get to in the time allotted! We’ve compiled the questions and answers as a follow-up. SoapBox + MetaMetrics Webinar Q&A.
Interested in the Lexile Oral Reading Framework?
If you are interested in learning more about our oral reading framework, assessment solutions, or measurement, complete our form and a team member will reach out to you. Want to give it a try? Check out our demo site to get a Lexile measure for your oral reading ability!