NCSA Pre-Conference Session: Speech to Text and Scribing – Getting a Handle on What it Means

NCEO and the ASES SCASS will be hosting a pre-session at the National Conference on Student Assessment in San Diego California titled, Speech to Text and Scribing – Getting a Handle on What it Means. This session will be held on June 26 from 3:30–6:30 p.m.

This NCSA pre-session will bring together states, assessment vendors, and other educational stakeholders to address the need to develop clarity on the implementation of the speech-to-text and scribe accessibility features and accommodations. Speech to text is being more commonly used by all students during instruction, and given that it is a daily tool many students use with their phones, it is no surprise that it is becoming more of an issue in testing. Session participants will grapple with many thorny issues:

  • What is the evidence of the validity of results when used by different students?
  • How should potential security issues be addressed?
  • How can states work with vendors to get speech to text systems that more smoothly interface with the test delivery system?
  • What guidance is needed related to student use of their own devices for speech to text during testing?
  • How can software issues that create challenges “training” the assistive technology to understand what is being said be addressed so that there is less need to rely on human scribes?
  • What are appropriate criteria for determining whether students use scribes or speech to text?
  • When is it appropriate for human scribes to scribe the speaking portion of the ELP assessment to produce a transcript?
  • What resources and training do educators, parents, and students need to support better decision making and implementation of scribing and speech to text?
  • Is there a need for certification of assistive technology for interoperability?
  • What related guidance is needed for related software features like word counts, grammar check, topic dictionaries, etc.?

The goals of this session are to: (1) discuss implementation and policy challenges and ways to address them, (2) begin to develop common terminology and definitions that more precisely describe the types of speech to text so that these descriptions can be used in RFPs, and (3) identify research needs for text to speech.

This pre-session is free and open to the public. Register for the pre-session at: http://nceotacenter.org/ncsa/