Regenerative Reading Assessments

Through the IES Reading for Understanding Initiative, ETS created ReadBasix—a reading assessment that can quickly and reliably identify the root causes of secondary students’ reading difficulties. In a previous IES SBIR project, we built Capti—an innovative assessment platform, and integrated ReadBasix. Capti ReadBasix makes it easy to create and assign assessments. Teachers use detailed reports to gain insights into their students’ strengths and weaknesses and inform instruction; administrators compare student performance across classes/schools; and researchers use ReadBasix to evaluate the effectiveness of new interventions. This Project will fully develop a regenerative component of Capti ReadBasix assessment. The component that will use AI and NLP to automatically generate new assessment items with minimal human effort. This Project will: 1) continuously regenerate ReadBasix to expand its item-pool, increase its selection of topics, and ensure that its items stay culturally relevant and secure; and 2) enable educators to quickly generate localized assessments from their own curricula, thus creating curricula-aligned reading assessments. Creating localized version of ReadBasix will increase student engagement, and ultimately, increase student achievement. Once developed, the generative approach can be scaled to other assessments.