More than 600 children in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are better readers thanks to Carnegie Mellon's Reading Tutor.
Developed over the last decade by Carnegie Mellon’s Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables), the Reading Tutor displays stories on a computer screen, uses a speech recognizer to listen to children as they read aloud and responds with spoken and graphical assistance when necessary.
Last fall, Jack Mostow, principal investigator on the Reading Tutor project, and his team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh received a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance the tutor. Project LISTEN will use the four-year grant to improve the program's speech and user-modeling technologies.
“What we do with this grant will improve how the Reading Tutor listens to children read aloud, assesses their skills, intervenes and helps them learn to read,” said Mostow. “Children who use the Reading Tutor have improved significantly more in reading comprehension and other skills than statistically matched controls. But the Reading Tutor’s effectiveness is limited by an inability to accurately hear and model the students with whom it is interacting.
“This work will integrate and extend methods from speech technology, cognitive psychology, user modeling and intelligent tutors,” he said.
Eight schools in Pittsburgh and one in North Carolina use the Reading Tutor. According to Mostow, it has helped to improve the reading skills of hundreds of children in the Pittsburgh area.
“The project has the potential to improve literacy for thousands of children who use the Reading Tutor as we work to enhance it, as well as many more who will use it thereafter,” said Mostow.
