Carnegie Speech

Companies can use Carnegie Speech’s patented speech recognition technology and the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading to accurately measure fluency to the phonemic level

DURHAM, N.C. & PITTSBURGH, PA. –  September 27, 2022 – Today MetaMetrics ® , developer of the widely adopted Lexile ® Framework, announced an extension of its partnership with Carnegie Speech for automating the evaluation of oral reading fluency for preK-12 students. Carnegie Speech’s spoken English technology is fully integrated with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading, providing edtech companies with a single API for delivering Lexile measures for students’ oral 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. “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.”

Used for decades by leading companies and universities, such as Stanford, Yale and Northwestern, Carnegie Speech’s patented pinpointing technology is able to accurately assess spoken English to the phonemic level for speakers of 63 different languages, not requiring re-engineering for different dialects and accents.

Historically, teachers have used Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) to measure student oral reading ability, but that approach had well-known shortcomings. One issue was that it took significant teacher time to listen to each student read aloud individually, counting the number of words read correctly. Another concern was that differences in passage difficulty were not captured by the traditional WCPM metric. The Lexile oral reading measure takes into account not just WCPM and accuracy, but also the difficulty of the passage read aloud. With the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading and Carnegie Speech’s technology, the time-consuming manual calculation of a student’s oral reading ability is replaced by a voice-enabled approach that’s automated and proven, saving valuable teacher time and providing a scale for measuring student growth. “

The unfinished learning resulting from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic is staggering. The recent NAEP scores showed the largest average score decline in reading in three decades,” said Malbert Smith, CEO and co-founder, MetaMetrics. “It is more important than ever before that teachers have easy- to-use, accurate tools for assessing literacy development, beginning with the youngest learners. 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.”