IIT Bombay develops TARA app to help improve reading fluency among students

Mumbai: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has developed a mobile application that can automatically measure oral reading proficiency using speech processing and machine learning technology.

The app – Teacher’s Assistant for Reading Assessment (TARA) – will help examine and improve oral reading proficiency among students and it has been adopted by the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), the institute announced on Thursday.

About the app

“The system is trained on expert-annotated recordings of children’s readings and currently works in English and Hindi, with its reliability verified to match that of human experts,” said Preeti Rao, professor at IIT Bombay from the Department of Electrical Engineering, which led the project. in a statement.

From an audio recording of a child reading aloud a passage appropriate for their level, TARA extracts rubrics for ORF (oral reading fluency), including WCPM (words correct per minute), widely used, the press release indicates.

Expression is another important dimension of fluent reading, strongly linked to the reader’s understanding of the text. With TARA, speech phrasing, intonation and stress are also measured to obtain a holistic score that indicates the precise stage of reading development, he adds.

The project was funded by the Tata Center for Technology and Design, Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship as well as the school education community.

Dr Shailaja Menon, reading pedagogy expert and head of the Center of Excellence in Early Language and Literacy at Tata Trusts, said: “Organizations have long felt the need for a digital tool that offers real-time data on learning levels.

TARA fills this gap with an end-to-end system that facilitates audio recording and provides performance data for each child, as well as cohorts such as class, school and region, on one dashboard, indicates the press release.

The innovative app was recently adopted by KVS for ORF assessment in English and Hindi for grades 3 to 8 involving over 7 lakh students in 1,200 schools across India, making it By far the largest exercise of its kind undertaken in the country, he added.

(With the exception of the title, this article has not been edited by the FPJ editorial staff and is automatically generated from an agency feed.)