FLORA: Fluent oral reading assessment of children's speech

We present initial results of FLORA, an accessible computer program that uses speech recognition to provide an accurate measure of children's oral reading ability. FLORA presents grade-level text passages to children, who read the passages out loud, and computes the number of words correct per minute (WCPM), a standard measure of oral reading fluency. We describe the main components of the FLORA program, including the system architecture and the speech recognition subsystems. We compare results of FLORA to human scoring on 783 recordings of grade level text passages read aloud by first through fourth grade students in classroom settings. On average, FLORA WCPM scores were within 3 to 4 words of human scorers across students in different grade levels and schools.