The Sounds of Silence: Towards Automated Evaluation of Student Learning in a Reading Tutor that Listens

1 We propose a paradigm for ecologically valid, authentic, unobtrusive, automatic, data-rich, fast, robust, and sensitive evaluation of computer-assisted student performance. We instantiate this paradigm in the context of a Reading Tutor that listens to children read aloud, and helps them. We introduce inter-word latency as a simple prosodic measure of assisted reading performance. Finally, to validate the measure and analyze performance improvement, we report initial experimental results from the first extended in-school deployment of the Reading Tutor. Content areas: computer aided education, spoken language understanding, user interfaces, cognitive modeling, multimedia

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Jack Mostow, Gregory Aist
• Keywords: AAAI 1997, Computer-assisted Student Performance, Intelligent Agents, Reading Tutor, Simple Prosodic Measure