MetaMetrics Partners with Carnegie Speech for Automating Reading Assessments

MetaMetrics, developer of the Lexile Framework, is extending its partnership with Carnegie Speech ;to automate the evaluation of oral reading fluency for students in pre-K through high school. Carnegie Speech's spoken English technology is fully integrated with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading, providing a single API for delivering Lexile measures for students' reading abilities.

"For nearly 20 years, our research-based speech technologies have been used to assess spoken language for learners around the globe," said Angela Kennedy, president and CEO of Carnegie Speech, in a statement. "Through our technology's integration with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading, we can collaborate with edtech companies to automate the measurement of oral reading fluency for all learners, providing a measure that will help teachers accelerate their growth."

Carnegie Speech's pinpointing technology can assess spoken English to the phonemic level for speakers of 63 languages with different dialects and accents. With the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading and Carnegie Speech's technology, the manual calculation of students' oral reading ability is replaced by an automated, voice-enabled approach.

With reading scores falling following COVID-19 school lockdowns, "it is more important than ever before that teachers have easy-to-use, accurate tools for assessing literacy development, beginning with the youngest learners," said Malbert Smith, CEO and co-founder of MetaMetrics, in a statement. "Our extended partnership with Carnegie Speech provides edtech companies with proven technology and measures to allow schools to measure student oral reading fluency, regardless of their native language, dialect, or accent."