MUMBAI: In a unique effort to transform literacy assessment to be scalable, objective, and reliable, researchers from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) have created a mobile application to measure oral reading fluency automatically using speech processing and machine learning technology.
From an audio recording of a child reading a level-appropriate passage aloud, the app, called TARA (Teacher’s Assistant for Reading Assessment), extracts rubrics for oral reading fluency, including the widely employed CPM (words correct per minute).
“The system is trained on expert-annotated recordings of children’s reading and currently works for English and Hindi, with its reliability verified to match that of human experts,” said professor Preeti Rao from the department of electrical engineering, who developed TARA. Expression is another important dimension of fluent reading that is strongly linked to the reader’s understanding of the text, she added. With TARA, phrasing (grouping of words), intonation and stress in speech are also measured to obtain a holistic score that is indicative of the precise stage of reading development.
“Organisations have long sought a digital tool providing real-time data on learning levels. TARA fills this gap with an end-to-end solution,” said Shailaja Menon, a reading pedagogy expert with Tata Trusts.
Funded by the Tata Centre of Technology & Design and the Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship, TARA has already made significant strides. Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) adopted the app to assess over seven lakh students across 1,200 schools, making it India’s largest literacy evaluation exercise. A baseline test in Oct established ORF benchmarks for Grades 3-8 in both English and Hindi.
This collaboration supports the NIPUN Bharat National Mission, where KVS schools act as models for achieving FLN by Grade 3. TARA can also aid in developing targeted remedial instruction, with future assessments expected to show improved outcomes.
According to the 2022 Annual Status of Education Report, over half of Class 5 students could not read Class 2-level text. The NE estimated that five crore Indian students lacked foundational literacy and numeracy skills, a gap worsened by the Covid pandemic, which resulted in 90% of students losing at least one language ability, such as reading comprehension.