Monday 13 June 2022

Assessing speech

 To assess children's speech, I need to create a rubric. I researched ways that people have previously used rubrics to measure speech.

Fountas & Pinnell's (2010) Six Dimensions Fluency Rubric

This rubric can be used to measure:

  • Pausing
  • Phrasing
  • Stress
  • Intonation
  • Rate/pace
  • Integration
This article clearly explains these six dimensions.

Fluency Rubric. This includes:
  • Expression & Volume
  • Phrasing (also in Fountas & Pinnell's rubric)
  • Smoothness
  • Pace (also in Fountas & Pinnell's rubric)
Morrison & Wilcox (2020). Assessing Expressive Oral Reading Fluency.
  • Rubric with same focus points as the fluency rubric above.
  • Expressive oral language has been seen as important for a long time. In American education, many children read from the bible and there was an expectation that they read fluently.
  • Early 1900s: a push for silent reading over oral reading, with valid justification for this, oral reading became less expressive.
  • Report of the National Reading Panel (2000): 3 aspects of fluent oral reading: rate, accuracy, expression. 
  • Prosody: How one reads with expression (not just the superficial features of consonant and vowel sounds).
  • Prosody <---> Comprehension (Schwanenflugel and Kuhn)
  • Automated measuring tool: Praat (2001) by Paul Boersma and David Weenink
  • Multidimensional fluency scale (MDFS). Zutell and Rasinski - Found to create reliable and valid scores.
  • This article recommends that human scored assessment tools are more effective than computerised tools as more is picked up via observation in terms of oral reading aspects. It is important for the human assessment tool that the rater/scorer is consistent otherwise reliability and validity reduces. 
From this, I put together a rubric which combines categories from all the above. I will share this in my next blog post.

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