IIT Bombay Develops 'TARA' App to Improve Reading Fluency in Students

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

The app -- Teacher's Assistant for Reading Assessment (TARA) -- will help in examining and enhancing oral reading fluency in students and it has been adopted by the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), the institute said on Thursday.

"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 IIT Bombay Professor from Department of Electrical Engineering Preeti Rao, who led the project, in a statement.

From an audio recording of a child reading a level-appropriate passage aloud, TARA extracts rubrics for ORF (oral reading fluency), including the widely employed WCPM (words correct per minute), said the statement.

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

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

Dr Shailaja Menon, reading pedagogy expert and Lead, Centre of Excellence in Early Language and Literacy at Tata Trusts, 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, the statement said.

The innovative app has been recently adopted by the KVS for English and Hindi ORF assessment for Grades 3-8 involving over 7 lakh students in 1,200 schools across India, making it by far the largest such exercise undertaken in the country, it added.

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