Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) was a 25-year research project at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

to improve children's reading skills
Project LISTEN
The project created a computer-based Reading Tutor that listens to a child reading aloud, corrects errors, helps when the child is stuck or encounters a hard word, provides hints, assesses progress, and presents more advanced text when the child is ready. The Reading Tutor has been used daily by hundreds of children in field tests at schools in the United States, Canada, Ghana, and India. Thousands of hours of usage logged at multiple levels of detail, including millions of words read aloud, have been stored in a database that has been mined to improve the Tutor's interactions with students. An extensive list of publications (with abstracts) can be found at Carnegie Mellon University. Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor is now being transformed into "RoboTutor" by Carnegie Mellon’s team competing in the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal of the Global Learning XPRIZE is to develop open-source Android tablet apps, in both English and Swahili, that enables children in developing countries who have little or no access to schooling to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic without adult assistance. RoboTutor is an integrated collection of intelligent tutors and educational games implemented on an Android tablet, and is now being field-tested in Tanzania.

History

Project LISTEN was led by (now Emeritus) Professor David 'Jack' Mostow, who currently leads Carnegie Mellon's "RoboTutor" team in the Global Learning XPRIZE competition. Project LISTEN was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through DARPA Order 5167, the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

under ITR/IERI Grant No. IEC-0326153, Grant No. REC-0326153 from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and under Grants R305B070458, R305A080157 and R305A080628, and by the Heinz Endowments. Project LISTEN's purpose was to develop, evaluate, and refine an intelligent tutor to listen to children read aloud, and help them learn to read. As part of the research and testing, Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor has been used with positive results by hundreds of children in the United States, Canada, and other countries. (See Prototype Testing below.) Results indicated that often the students whose initial proficiency was lowest benefited most from the Reading Tutor. Of particular interest was the strong performance of the Reading Tutor for

English Language Learners English-Language Learner (often abbreviated as ELL) is a term used in some English-speaking countries such as the US and Canada to describe a person who is learning the English language and has a native language that is not English. Some education ...

. Project Listen fits well into Carnegie Mellon University'
Simon Initiative
whose goal is to use ''learning science'' research to improve educational practice. As noted in the History of the Simon Initiative, "The National Science Foundation included Project LISTEN’s speech recognition system as one of its top 50 innovations from 1950-2000."

How it works

The goal of the Reading Tutor is to make the student experience of learning to read using it as effective or more effective than being tutored by a human coach - for example, as described at the Intervention Central website. A child selects an item from a

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...

listing texts from a source such the

Weekly Reader ''Weekly Reader'' was a weekly educational classroom magazine designed for children. It began in 1928 as ''My Weekly Reader''. Editions covered curriculum themes in the younger grade levels and news-based, current events and curriculum themed-i ...

or authored stories. The Reading Tutor listens to the child read aloud using Carnegie Mellon’s Sphinx – II Speech Recognizer to process and interpret the student's oral

reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...

. When the Reading Tutor notices a student misread a word, skip a word, get stuck, hesitate, or click for help, it responds with assistance modeled in part on expert reading teachers, adapted to the capabilities and limitations of

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

. The Reading Tutor dynamically updates its estimate of a student’s reading level and picks stories a bit harder (or easier) according to the estimated level; this approach allows the Reading Tutor to aim for the

zone of proximal development The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a concept in educational psychology. It represents the distance between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported, and what they can only do supported. It is the range where they are capable only with ...

, that is, to expand the span of what a learner currently can do without help, toward what he or she can do with help. The Tutor also

scaffolds Scaffolding, also called scaffold or staging, is a temporary structure used to support a work crew and materials to aid in the construction, maintenance and repair of buildings, bridges and all other man-made structures. Scaffolds are widely used ...

(provides support for) key processes in reading. It explains unfamiliar words and concepts by presenting short

factoid A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, ''or'' a true but brief or trivial item of news or information. The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes ac ...

s (that is, comparisons to other words). It can provide both spoken and

graphical Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, ...

assistance when the student has a problem. The Tutor represents Visual speech using talking mouth

video clips Video clips refer to mostly short videos, most of the time called memes, which are short videos of silly jokes and funny clips, most of the time coming from movies or any entertainment videos such as YouTube. The term is also used more loosely to ...

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s. It assists word identification by previewing new words, reading hard words aloud, and giving rhyming and other hints. Detailed data on the interactions is saved in a database, and data-mining has been used to improve the Reading Tutor and investigate research questions.

Prototype Testing

Project LISTEN trials demonstrated usability, user acceptance, effective assistance, and pre-to-post-test gains. A number of controlled studies extended over several months, with student use of 20 minutes per day. Use of the Reading Tutor produced higher comprehension gains than current methods. To ensure there was no third variable involved, different treatments were compared within the same classrooms, with randomized assignment of children to treatments, stratified by pretest scores. Valid and reliable measures (Woodcock.1998) were used to measure gains between pre and post test. Data gathered during each trial was used to improve the efficacy of the tutor. Various controlled studies were carried out as the Reading Tutor evolved, for example, # Pilot Study(1996–97) # Within-classroom comparison(1998) # Comparison to human tutors(1999-2000) # Equal-time comparison to Sustained Silent Reading (2000-2001) Since 2005, researchers both within and outside Project LISTEN have conducted and published controlled studies of the Reading Tutor. (See list in).

Awards

Project Listen has received global recognition and many awards: * 1994: Outstanding Paper Award at the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence * 1998: Represented the Computing Research Association (CRA) at the Coalition for National Science Funding Exhibit (CNSF) for Congress * 2000: The National Science Foundation included Project LISTEN in its "Nifty Fifty" list of top 50 innovations from 1950-2000. * 2002: Distinguished Finalist for the International Reading Association's Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award * 2002: Project LISTEN videos included in PBS series "Reading Rockets" * 2008: Best Paper Award at the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. * 2008: Best Paper Nominee at the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems * 2011: Best Paper Nominee at the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. * 2012: Best Paper Award at the 25th Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-25). * 2012: Best Student Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Educational Data Mining * 2013: Finalist for Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Memphis, TN *

References

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External links