IIT Bombay’s TARA mobile app to help achieve nationwide oral reading fluency; KVS first to adopt

NEW DELHI: A research team from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, led by Preeti Rao, Department of Electrical Engineering, has collaborated with language experts and teachers to create a mobile application to measure oral reading fluency automatically using speech processing and machine learning technology.

The mobile app will be called Teacher’s Assistant for Reading Assessment (TARA). The application will extract rubrics for ORF including the widely employed words correct per minute (WCPM) by recording audio of a child reading a level-appropriate passage aloud.

The researchers have teamed up to transform literacy assessment to make it more scalable, objective, and reliable. It has received funding from the Tata Centre of Technology and Design and Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship as well as some traction in the school education community.

“Expression is another important dimension of fluent reading that is strongly linked to the reader’s understanding of the text. 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,” Preeti Rao said.

“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,” she said.

Reading pedagogy expert and lead at Center of Excellence in Early Language and Literacy at Tata Trusts Shailaja Menon said: “Organisations have long felt the need for a digital tool offering real-time data on learning levels.”

“TARA addresses this gap with an end-to-end system that facilitates audio recording and provides performance data for each child, as well as for cohorts such as class, school and region, on a dashboard,” it said.

The mobile app, TARA, has been adopted by the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghatan (KVS) for English and Hindi ORF assessment for Classes 3 to 8 involving over 7 lakh students in 1,200 schools across India. The baseline test was conducted in 6 KV schools in October this year.

The researchers said that they will continue to collaborate with KVS to develop remedial instruction for students to help them improve their reading ability as well as to check the effectiveness of the remedial. “IIT Bombay welcomes new partnerships and collaborations with the larger goal of facilitating evidence-based solutions for school education,” it added.

According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of 2022, more than half of Class 5 students could not read Class 2 level text. "While the NEP 2020 report indicated that at least 5 crore students in India were yet to attain foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) skills, the Covid-19 pandemic worsened the situation as 90% of students lost at least one specific language ability, such as describing a picture or reading with understanding."