Read Aloud Grading


The ReadAloud activity's grading settings determine how a reading is graded.  In most cases the student’s reading is machine evaluated. But it is possible to manually grade, or to correct the machine evaluation, for a students attempt. There are a number of settings which affect how a ReadAloud activity will be evaluated and which evaluation will be sent to the gradebook.


Enable AI

By default AI is enabled and this will use speech-to-text (STT) to evaluate a student's reading. If turned off, the attempts must be graded manually.


Human or Machine Grading

Evaluations can be machine (AI) or human (manual). This setting controls which evaluation to use as a grade. 


Never use machine eval. for grade
Ignore machine evaluations and only submit human evaluations to the gradebook.
Use human or machine eval. for grade
Use either machine, or human. If both are available it will prefer the human evaluation.
Always use machine eval. for grade
Ignore human evaluations and only submit machine evaluations to the gradebook.

 

Grade Options

Since a student can usually perform multiple attempts on a reading, ReadAloud allows the activity author to specify whether the latest attempt or the highest scoring attempt is submitted to the gradebook. Note that this setting does not affect which attempt is shown on the grading page. The grading page always shows the latest attempt. But it is still possible to access earlier attempts from the grading page, by clicking on the attempts count displayed in the student's "attempts" column.


Grade Calculation

Several settings are used to turn the correct words per minute (WPM) score into a grade. 


The basic grade calculation is:


Grade = (WPM / Target WPM)  x 100


e.g If the student reads for one minute, and 75 words are evaluated as read correctly, if the target WPM is 100, then the student will get a grade of 75%.


The WPM score is calculated as the number of correct words read in 60 seconds. If the reading time is greater or less than 60 seconds, ReadAloud will calculate the reading rate to produce a WPM score.  The reading time is taken from the activity time limit.
e.g If the time limit is 30s and the student reads 30 words, their WPM score will be 60 WPM


However if the "can exit early" setting is checked, and the student stops the reading before the time limit, then the duration of the students reading is used to calculate the WPM score.

e.g If the student reads for 20 seconds and exits, Poodll will multiply the correct words read by 3, to create a WPM score. 


Combatting insincere readers

Students will sometimes attempt to gain a better grade by reading insincerely. Two methods to do this are:


i) Read a short portion of the passage correctly and "exit early."


It is advisable to not check "can exit early" if your class contains such students. Even if it is unchecked, a student can press stop on the recorder and finish early, but the grade calculation will use the time limit when calculating the WPM score. So their grade will be low.


ii) Read the passage extremely quickly


This will create a lot of correct words, but also a lot of error words. Since only the correct words are counted, this can raise the students WPM and therefore their grade. To counter this there is a "Strict" option for Grade Calculation.


The strict calculation is as follows:


Grade = (WPM - Errors) / Target WPM  x 100


This will mitigate the problem to some extent, but the student may still gain some advantage.


Forcing a Regrade

If settings that affect grading are changed, the teacher will want to re-evaluate the students attempts and submit the grades to the gradebook again. These two steps can be done from the "Alternatives Admin" tab.

The save and re-evaluate all attempts will run the machine evaluation across all of the attempts again, after first updating any new "alternatives." 


The Re-push evaluations to the gradebook button will send the evaluations to the gradebook again.