SBIR Phase I: Bilingual Literacy Assessment and Skill Tracker

他的SBIR第一期项目将开发一种创新的应用程序，面向进入教育系统的日益增长的新出现的双语人口。尽管他们的规模越来越大（约占美国总人口的20%），新兴双语者仍然没有足够的支持来在学术环境中取得成功，并且经常成为减法双语过程的受害者，最终倾向于以牺牲母语为代价来学习英语。当这种情况发生时，儿童个体失去了宝贵的经济和文化资源，以及与双语相关的认知优势。反过来，社会失去了多语言资源和丰富的文化知识，而这些是与外国进行贸易和外交等所必需的。因此，该项目的目标是跟踪双语学生在整个教育过程中的进步。它旨在通过提供一个基于研究的、符合标准的、儿童友好的双语读写和认知技能评估工具，以及一个教师、家长和学生可以共同合作促进双语发展的教育平台，来支持学生的双语发展。该项目包括一个移动设备和/或基于网络的阅读、写作和口语技能自动双语评估，向教师（和家长）提供实时结果。评估是直观的，适合每个孩子，并辅以推荐的活动，自动定制每个学生的需求。目的是帮助教师深入了解双语学生的优势和劣势，并排除通常被错误地归咎于双语者的认知缺陷。这也是为了帮助老师和家长衡量、发展和培养新兴双语者带来的特殊技能，这些技能对社会的许多方面都有很大的好处。研发计划旨在开发一种从其他现有解决方案中脱颖而出的创新产品。关键的区别特征是：它专注于双语儿童，并在接受评估的双语答案方面具有适应性；它能够评估儿童的口语技能，这要归功于语音识别器的集成，该语音识别器将通过整合对儿童语音数据进行训练的机器学习算法进行改进；每个学生都可以选择接受适合他/她的个性化分析和活动。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

his SBIR Phase I project will develop an innovative application, geared towards the growing emergent bilingual population which enters the educational system. Despite their growing size (approximately 20 percent of the total US population), emergent bilinguals still do not have adequate support to succeed in an academic setting, and are often victims of a subtractive bilingualism process, which eventually favors the acquisition of English at the expense of the home language. When this happens, the individual child loses a valuable economic and cultural resource, as well as the cognitive benefits associated with bilingualism. In turn, society loses its multilingual resources and a wealth of cultural knowledge, which is necessary for trade and diplomacy with foreign nations, among other things. Therefore, the goal of the project is to track the progress of bilingual students throughout their education. It aims to support the students' bilingual development by providing a research-based, standard-aligned, and child-friendly bilingual literacy and cognitive skills assessment tool accompanied by an educational platform where teachers, parents, and students can collectively collaborate to promote bilingualism. The project consists of a mobile-device and/or web-based automated bilingual assessment of reading, writing and oral skills, that provides real-time results to teachers (and parents) of emergent bilinguals. The assessment is intuitive, adapting to each child, and is complemented by recommended activities that are automatically tailored to each student's needs. The goal is to help teachers gain an in-depth understanding of the bilingual student's strengths and weaknesses, and to rule out cognitive deficits that are usually wrongly ascribed to bilinguals. It is also to help teachers and parents gauge, develop, and nurture the specific skill set that emergent bilinguals bring with them and that strongly benefit many aspects of society. The R&D plan aims at developing an innovative product that stands out from other existing solutions. The key differentiating features are: its focus on bilingual children and its adaptability in accepting bilingual answers for the assessments, its capacity of assessing oral skills in children thanks to the integration of a speech recognizer that will be refined by integrating machine learning algorithms trained on children speech data, and the option for each student to receive a personalized bundle of analytics and activities that fit his/her profile.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.