Reading comprehension is largely tested in schools using handwritten responses. The paper describes computational methods of scoring such responses using handwriting recognition and automatic essay scoring technologies. The goal is to assign to each handwritten response a score which is comparable to that of a human scorer even though machine handwriting recognition methods have high transcript...

BACKGROUND Tests requiring the pronunciation of irregular words are used to estimate premorbid cognitive ability in patients with clinical diagnoses, and prior cognitive ability in normal ageing. However, scores on these word-reading tests correlate with scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a widely used screening test for possible cognitive pathology. This study aimed to test wh...

We have developed a rule-based system, Quarc, that can reada short story and find the sentence in the story that best answers a given question. Quarc uses heuristic rules that look for lexical and semantic clues in the question and the story. We have tested Quarc on reading comprehension tests typically given to children in grades 3-6. Overall, Quarc found the correct sentence 40% of the time, ...

Standard tests aim to evaluate the performance of examinees using different tests with consistent difficulties. Thus, a critical demand is to predict the difficulty of each test question before the test is conducted. Existing studies are usually based on the judgments of education experts (e.g., teachers), which may be subjective and labor intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel Test-aware...

BACKGROUND Auditory temporal processing and reading. AIM To analyse the potential correlations between reading acquisition, phonological awareness, and auditory temporal processing in Brazilian children with dyslexia. METHOD This study evaluated sixty children, nine to twelve years of age, divided into two groups: a control group of twenty seven children without dyslexia and a study group o...

When taking multiple-choice tests of reading comprehension such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), test takers use a range of strategies that vary in the extent to which they emphasize reading the questions versus reading the passages. Researchers have challenged the construct validity of these tests because test takers can achieve better-than-chance performance even if they do not read t...

This paper describes our use of inter-word latency, the delay before a student speaks a word in the course of reading a sentence, to assess oral reading automatically. The context of our study is a Reading Tutor that uses automated speech recognition to listen to children read aloud. Using the data from 58 students from grades 1 through 4, we used inter-word latency to predict scores on externa...

This study explored relations of print exposure, academic achievement, and reading habits among 100 deaf and 100 hearing college students. As in earlier studies, recognition tests for book titles and magazine titles were used as measures of print exposure, college entrance test scores were used as measures of academic achievement, and students provided self-reports of reading habits. Deaf stude...