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One of the hidden advantages of video games is that they offer automatic assessments: Winning one shows a user that she has mastered all she needs to know 鈥� no pesky final exam required. 

That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that鈥檚 a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That鈥檚 the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates鈥� of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers鈥� workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

鈥淭he future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,鈥� said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates鈥� head of assessment and research. 鈥淚t is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.鈥�

The future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction.

Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher鈥檚 popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do.聽

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can鈥檛 just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media 鈥� watching, listening and reading in equal measure 鈥� to understand what they鈥檙e learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child鈥檚 abilities, since in all but the most special cases there鈥檚 little space between a child鈥檚 thoughts and his or her utterances. 鈥淚t’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,鈥� said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox鈥檚 chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates 鈥渃onfounding factors鈥� that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students鈥� voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what鈥檚 on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids鈥� understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children鈥檚 learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids鈥� voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

鈥楾hey shout, they whisper, they sing鈥�

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

鈥淪uitably impressed,鈥� Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn鈥檛 actually mastered the material 鈥� she鈥檇 simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. 鈥淪he had learned to hack the game,鈥� Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter鈥檚 ingenuity 鈥� but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

(Kids) shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words.

Patricia Scanlon, SoapBox Labs

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to 鈥渋nvisibly and continuously鈥� quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can鈥檛 hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: 鈥淭hey shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,鈥� she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary 鈥渧oice engine鈥� that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon鈥檚 Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in 鈥済rown-up鈥� situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren鈥檛 built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox鈥檚 CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox鈥檚 AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

鈥淚f it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,鈥� said Kelly.

(Speech) is the most natural way for most children to convey information.

Amelia Kelly, SoapBox Labs

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI 鈥渃an be the great equalizer here,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 think it can help solve the literacy crisis 鈥� but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.鈥�

The terms of the November sale weren鈥檛 disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it鈥檚 still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she鈥檚 eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity 鈥� especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, 鈥淚 don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently鈥� when a particular student says it. 鈥淏ut I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.鈥�

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to 麻豆精品.

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