In this paper, we present iSTART-Early, an intelligent tutoring system that provides automated instruction and practice on higher-order reading comprehension strategies to 3rd and 4th grade students. iSTART-Early provides personalized, interactive, game-based strategy instruction and practice on comprehension strategies (i.e., Ask It, Reword It,…

Literacy assessment is essential for effective literacy instruction and training. However, traditional paper-based literacy assessments are typically decontextualized and may cause stress and anxiety for test takers. In contrast, serious games and game environments allow for the assessment of literacy in more authentic and engaging ways, which has…

Speech technology (automated speech recognition -- ASR and text-to-speech) offers great promise in the field of automated literacy and reading tutors for children. Students in third and fourth grades struggle with generating longer strings of text on a QWERTY keyboard because they still "hunt and peck" for AQ1 the letters and symbols…