CORE – UO Research Supports Literacy Evaluation Program

April 2020

University research to improve reading fluency assessments will soon be helping teachers across the nation, thanks to a licensing agreement with the education technology company Analytical Measures Inc.

College of Education research associate professor Joe Nese developed the Computerized Oral Reading Evaluation (CORE) to reduce the workload for teachers who must frequently test their students’ reading levels. Evaluation combines an innovative psychometric model and a custom set of reading passages with speech recognition software to better evaluate student reading ability.

The automated evaluation allows teachers to simultaneously administer brief reading assessments to multiple students with fewer errors, providing a more accurate understanding of students’ reading development.

Analytical Measures will incorporate the tool into its Moby.Read application. The new tool and Moby.Read both received funding from the Institute of Education Sciences.

“It’s a good example of public grant money coming together to make research accessible and available to educators,” Nese said.

Nese and co-principal investigator Akihito Kamata plan to further improve the system by adding the capability to measure “reading prosody,” or how expressive students are when they read, like if they pause at commas or change their tone to emphasize dialogue and questions.

“Eventually what we really want is to better assess if students understand what they’re reading, rather than just measuring speed and accuracy,” Nese said.