The TBALL project aims to advance the state of the art in speech processing, datamining, and human-computer interface design. It integrates these technologies with a progressive understanding of the components of academic performance to develop an effective, child-friendly literacy assessment system.

The project is studying the impact of this approach with native American English speakers and non-native speakers of Mexican-Spanish background, longitudinally from K-2. It will:

• Analyze children's speech as they grow
• Develop speech recognition algorithms for automated assessments
• Create a query-based, longitudinal database for each student
• Derive instructional guidance from the analysis of an ongoing professional development program for teachers of native and non-native speakers
• Allow teachers to make more timely and appropriate decisions about curriculum and instructional interventions.

The project fosters interdisciplinary activities at:
     UCLA - Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Education
     USC - Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Psychology
     UCB - Education

TBALL is supported in part by IERI award number 0326214 from the
National Science Foundation