Tech that offers new ways to teach children to read

As each student reads a passage aloud, the software maps onto the few hundred limited skills needed to become a fluent reader.

The dashboard tells the teacher if the student needs help breaking down words into their parts, or if they consistently pronounce certain sounds, and offers games and exercises to help. The teacher receives different feedback for each student, whose skill level can range from knowing how to read independently to not knowing their own name.

The education-technology industry wants this to be the future of how writing is taught in America’s classrooms—hypotheses of technologies created by several companies. Speech recognition software integrated with physical books becomes a natural part of reading instruction. Students are unknowingly constantly assessed by the technology, allowing teachers to provide individualized learning tracks and encourage students to learn how many have not mastered previous skills, rather than moving them all forward.

“Technology is an important aid, if we can learn what’s good and what’s bad and what’s not,” said Ralph Smith, managing director of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a network of community groups focused on improving reading. Competence among children in low-income families.

The ultimate goal is to help pull the United States out of its decades-long reading crisis. In 2019, more than a third of fourth-graders nationwide could read proficiently, according to the federal government’s widely used National Assessment of Educational Progress benchmarking test. Many fear the epidemic, which was up 37 percent in 2017, will worsen when new NAEP results are released in the fall.

Learning to read by the end of third grade is crucial, educators say, so children can use reading to learn the rest of the curriculum.

The basis of the new technology tools is the “science of reading,” which divides reading into five parts: phonics, or relating sounds to written letters; phonemic awareness, or learning the sounds that make up words; Dictionary: efficiency and reading comprehension. Advocates of science-based approaches have been locked in opposition since the middle of the last century by pressure methods that emphasize hearsay and general perception. Many states are in the process of retraining teachers with more vocal-heavy methods.

When K-12 students return to schools this fall and beyond, they’ll have access to more devices powered by kid-specific voice-recognition technology, such as from Dublin-based Soapbox Labs. The company has been working on the technology since 2013, training it to recognize children’s speech patterns, dialects and idiosyncrasies that traditional voice-command systems can misinterpret. It launched a new version in June to help assess whether young children can recognize and pronounce letter names and sounds, which companies can now license to create reading products sold to schools.

Microsoft has developed its own voice-recognition-enabled reading program. A new feature records students reading passages aloud and coaches them on problem words. Publisher McGraw Hill is developing a system to track and display hundreds of writing-related skills in a teacher dashboard. Other apps and computer programs aim to teach children to read using games, make story time more engaging, and provide sound effects for students to access hundreds of digital books.

Some educators and literacy specialists are skeptical that technology can help around the edges, but there’s no substitute for good quality teaching and children consistently practicing reading.

“At the heart of the improvement we’re seeing in schools, it all has nothing to do with technology,” says Karen Vaits, a literacy advocate in New York.

Typically, teachers assess a student’s reading fluency by sitting next to them and reading aloud, with a stopwatch, and by marking passages where a student stumbles, misspells, or says something unscripted.

Many of the new and developing tools seek to automate that process, letting computers do the grading for teachers, freeing them to focus on teaching and more time grading students.

“We’re always trying to find something that tells us quickly where each of our students are,” says Shannon Griffin, a fourth-grade teacher in the Columbus, Ohio area.

Los Angeles-based Learning Age Inc. By identifying and modeling more than 400 skills and concepts that students from kindergarten through high school need to master reading, this new game-based reading program is the foundation. Before students can read simple single words like “cat,” they need to understand what letters stand for them, know that words are made up of single sounds, and combine those sounds verbally to form a spoken word.

Harlingen Unified Independent School District in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley tested the company’s software, My Reading Academy, last year with preschoolers ages 3 to 5. Carmen Alvarez, the district’s director of early childhood education, said most of the students are economically disadvantaged, and the first time they see a book is often in school. “Many parents are faced with a choice between providing their child with food and providing their child with books,” she said.

Ms. Alvarez said it helps teachers to be able to see the exact sounds a student is struggling with and to know which concepts students are mastering. The previous programs simply stated that the student was progressing.

Any missing skills “can catch up with me later and usually do,” Ms. Alvarez said.

At McGraw Hill, a team of engineers, data scientists, and content developers have mapped hundreds of reading skills tied to all 50 state standards that teachers can view in a dashboard to track student progress. A trial version is expected next spring.

“Each teacher can be their own data scientist and figure out what’s working and what’s not working in the classroom,” says Shawn Smith, K-12 chief innovation officer for McGraw Hill.

McGraw-Hill is talking with testing companies about its long-term vision: a real-time assessment system that would replace statewide tests that eat up classroom time and stress students, Mr. Smith said. McGraw Hill is testing a reading program using Soapbox’s voice recognition system.

After watching her own child struggle to interact with educational programs, Soapbox founder Patricia Scanlon set out to create a better way for technology to capture children’s voices. Children have thin vocal tracts, hoarse voices, and often don’t follow the rules of language, all of which can confuse voice recognition software. A parent knows their child means “green” when they say “gene,” but it may not be a computer.

Soapbox processed thousands of hours of audio data from around the world to develop its platform.

“The benefits of hearing students read to themselves are incredible,” says Shannon Lazarus, a kindergarten teacher in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. In the past, teachers made “reading phones” using PVC pipes that allowed students to hear their own voices.

Classroom teachers say they’re willing to give technology a chance, though some expect early glitches and extra work. Widespread adoption requires buy-in from parents and assurances that student privacy is taken seriously.

“Technology is a tool, it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself,” said Joel Kuperstein, head of curriculum development for The Learned Age.

Write Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com