That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that’s a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That’s the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates’ of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers’ workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

“The future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,” said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates’ head of assessment and research. “It is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.”

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher’s popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do. 

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can’t just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media — watching, listening and reading in equal measure — to understand what they’re learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child’s abilities, since in all but the most special cases there’s little space between a child’s thoughts and his or her utterances. “It’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,” said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox’s chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates “confounding factors” that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students’ voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what’s on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids’ understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children’s learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids’ voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

‘They shout, they whisper, they sing’

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

“Suitably impressed,” Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn’t actually mastered the material — she’d simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. “She had learned to hack the game,” Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter’s ingenuity — but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to “invisibly and continuously” quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can’t hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: “They shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,” she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary “voice engine” that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon’s Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in “grown-up” situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren’t built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox’s CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox’s AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

“If it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,” said Kelly.

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI “can be the great equalizer here,” she said. “I think it can help solve the literacy crisis — but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.”

The terms of the November sale weren’t disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it’s still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she’s eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity — especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, “I don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently” when a particular student says it. “But I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

In what could be a bellwether for schools across the U.S., young students in the nation’s fourth-largest school district are doing poorly on basic academics, recent data suggest, a key sign that pandemic schooling is taking a bracing toll.

Officials with Florida’s earlier this month reported that 43 percent of students who took January diagnostic tests in grades pre-K-3 tested below grade level in reading. And 54 percent tested below grade level in math.

Students in both at-home and in-person settings took the online tests.

The district educates some 334,000 students, more than nearly every district in the U.S., with the exception of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

An assessment expert said the Miami-Dade findings will likely be repeated nationwide as districts assess students more fully, and may actually underplay the extent of the crisis.

“The national trends are pointing in a direction at least as severe as what’s happening in Miami-Dade, and likely more severe,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, a Massachusetts-based firm whose tests are used in schools in the district and elsewhere nationwide. “These numbers from Miami-Dade are deeply troublesome, but the national picture, I think, is much more troublesome.”

The Miami-Dade findings are the latest to emerge in large districts nationwide since the school year began. Elsewhere, districts and advocacy groups have rung similar alarms. In Los Angeles, the group in late March issued a report that said the city’s children are in “an unprecedented educational crisis.” In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, officials in November said the percentage of middle- and high-school students earning F’s in at least two classes in the first quarter last fall.

Nationwide, the consulting firm McKinsey that U.S. students by this fall may have lost as much as a year of learning.

Miami-Dade school board member Mari Tere Rojas, who requested the testing data, noted that the problem is worse among older students, the Miami Herald . While just 15 percent of pre-K students tested behind grade level in reading and 13 percent in math, among third-graders the data showed that 27 percent were behind in reading and 40 percent in math.

that among third-graders nationally who took Curriculum Associates’ iReady tests last winter, 41 percent were below grade level in reading and 68 percent in math.

Among these students, another 22 percent were two or more grade levels below where they should be to do grade-level reading work, while 18 percent were two or more grade levels below in math.

About 8 million students take the iReady tests, according to the company’s .

The district is already moving to limit the damage from the past year or more of disruption. Lissette Alves, Miami-Dade’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, told the school board on May 12 that students identified as performing below grade level in reading based on a September assessment are already receiving more help, which can amount to an extra 30 minutes of daily reading or, in worse cases, an additional hour of intensive reading instruction.

They’re also planning to scale up an intensive reading and math summer school program for more than 65,000 students, with plans to use federal Covid relief funds to get students tutors and other kinds of extra help.

Miami parent Kimberli Nelson said her son Maddox, a first-grader at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Coral Gables, Fla., is “doing well with school from an academic perspective. But he pretty much just learned to sit quietly and draw pictures all day.”

Nelson said her son, who has been identified as gifted, had more difficulties with the “psychological element” of school disruption. To fight isolation, she said, “We had to just break out” and visit friends.

Nelson, a Black parent who grew up in Chicago, said the pandemic has been doubly hard for poor students, as well as students of color. Many of these students, she said, have parents who are essential workers and can’t supervise their at-home learning. “We’re having two pandemics, based upon race and poverty.”

The new achievement data were first reported by the Herald. Miami-Dade officials have said that one of their biggest concerns revolves around the estimated 10,000 students who for school — as well as 10,300 online-only students identified as at risk of failing.

In January, the district sent letters to at-risk students, urging them to return to in-person school. Of 5,400 contacted, about 3,600 have returned to classrooms.

The district did not respond to a request for comment. In March, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the school board that about 500 students remained missing, the Herald at the time. Most of these, he said, are English-language learners whose parents moved and whose phones were disconnected.

Nelson said she has worked with a community center and neighborhood afterschool program known as to support families and, in some cases, find students who couldn’t otherwise be located.

She credited the center’s longtime director, Sylvia Jordan, with tracking down many neighborhood kids. “If you can’t find them, Miss Sylvia can,” Nelson recalled telling district officials. “Some of our kids were going after school — they just weren’t going to school.”

In the district, the new achievement findings have been greeted with a mixed reception.

Board member Rojas called the data “alarming,” but Carvalho said he and his staff are approaching them with “trepidation” and “doubt,” since students learning from home may have had parental help on the tests — those in school, he said, may not have had the same assistance.

“It is data that we’re not going to take to the bank as we have in the past,” he told board members.

But Curriculum Associates’ Huff said she doesn’t suspect “widespread cheating” from students who took iReady tests at home. Even if students got help from family members, she said, she doubts there was intention to cheat.

“I think it was very innocent helping, because adults, older siblings, or others in the home did not realize that these young students — first, second, third graders — that they were taking a test that needed to happen independently. And if they had known that, they likely would not have helped — just like a parent would never help their child try to pass an eye test.”

So-called “Covid learning loss” has obsessed educators and researchers for the better part of a year, but Huff said the term doesn’t accurately describe what’s happening to students. She prefers the term “.”

“I do think it’s more accurate because a lot of what has happened is just less instructional time,” she said. “Students have not had the opportunity to learn. They didn’t have learning to lose. They were just not finished doing the learning that we would expect, given the circumstances of the past year.”