Using mobile technology for reading assessment

The enormous potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for addressing critical educational issues is generally acknowledged, but its use in the assessment of the complex skills of reading and understanding a text has been very limited to date. The paper contrasts traditional reading assessment protocols with ReadLet, an ICT platform with a tablet front-end, designed to support online monitoring of silent and oral reading abilities in early graders. ReadLet makes use of cloud computing and mobile technology for large-scale data collection and allows the time alignment of the child's reading behaviour with texts tagged using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. Initial findings replicate established benchmarks from the psycholinguistic literature on reading in both typically and atypically developing children, making the application a new ground-breaking approach in the evaluation of reading skills. Index Terms--reading assessment, reading research, mobile technology, NLP, cloud computing, special education needs.