Current Research Projects

Computerized Oral Reading Evaluation (CORE)

Date: 2014-2020

Traditional oral reading fluency assessments are quite useful in predicting students’ general reading proficiency, and although it only takes a couple minutes to assess one student, it requires a lot time and resources assess an entire classroom or school because each student is tested individually. CORE would help solve this problem by containing an automated speech recognition engine that scores students’ oral reading so that many students can be tested at once. In addition, CORE uses an advanced psychometric model to overcome some of the inadequacies of traditional oral reading assessments. The purpose of CORE is to help alleviate the resource demands of one-to-one testing administration, increase the reliability of fluency scores, and reduce instructional time lost to testing for both teachers and students. view more
CORE – UO Research Supports Literacy Evaluation Program


Data Science Initiative Seed Funding Program Grant

Date: 2020

The Data Science Initiative’s Seed Funding Program encourages new faculty partnerships and the development of innovative research and educational programs in data science. It is open to tenure-related faculty members or career faculty members in the research professor, research scientist, research engineer or research associate classification who hold a UO appointment during the academic year of the research award.

The Data Science Seed Funding program provides up to $50,000 for Piloting Grants which are meant to help projects turn into competitive proposals. The award supports expenses over a project period of up to 12 months.

  • Community Health and School Readiness: Closing the Gap. Daniel Anderson, Department of Behavioral Research and Teaching; Leilani Sáez, Department of Behavioral Research and Teaching; John Seeley, Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences.
    Community Health and School Readiness: Closing the Gap

Project ICEBERG

Pre-K and K-2015-2020

Project Iceberg (Intensifying Cognition, Early literacy, and Behavior for Exceptional Reading Growth) aims to enhance early learning data-based decision-making for preventing reading disabilities in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. Our primary goal is to build tablet-based resources and products for helping teachers effectively address children’s identified early risk for reading difficulties. view more


Inter-Rater Reliability Study (Oregon Extended Assessment/ORExt)

Date: Spring 2018

Behavioral Research & Teaching plans to observe a sample of Oregon’s Qualified Assessors (QAs) who administer the paper/pencil version of the Oregon Extended Assessment (ORExt) to determine reliability of administration and scoring. We will not include the tablet administration or the Oregon Observational Rating Assessment (ORora). The study will be conducted in two manners:

  1. QTs in each district will observe an assigned sample of their respective QAs using the observation protocol.
  2. Expert reviewers from ODE and/or Behavioral Research & Teaching (BRT) will observe district-level QTs/QAs who give the assessment in more than one school/district.

The observation protocol will be completed for the identified QA, but the student(s) and content area(s) observed will be selected by the QT or QA. BRT researchers will contact district-level QTs prior to the test window, which runs from February 15 – April 26, 2018, to arrange multiple observations that can hopefully be completed within one school day.
ORExt (OregonExtended)