The Need: The U.S. Special Operations Forces Language Office (SOFLO), the exclusive agent for the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) foreign language training program needed an efficient and accurate assessment of spoken Spanish proficiency.

The Solution: Ordinate developed a new Spanish language test similar to Ordinate's spoken English tests - telephone based with fully automated scoring. The Versant Spanish test was developed with data collected from more than 500 adult non-native Spanish learners, including military personnel and university students, and more than 500 native speakers of Spanish. Subsets of these speakers were also assessed with a variety of other rating instruments. Results show that the Versant Spanish test elicited sufficient spoken language behavior on which to base a reliable and accurate human judgment of practical speaking and listening skills. Furthermore, automatic scoring of responses from a Versant Spanish test administration can produce reliable and useful information about these spoken language skills. This exercise demonstrated Ordinate's ability to leverage its core technology into other languages. The Versant Spanish test is now fully owned by Ordinate and available commercially to other customers. Learn more...

The Need: The National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) at Harvard University was planning a multiple-part test of reading-related skills in cooperation with ETS. The test, RTOLD (RAN, TOWRE, Oral Language, Digit Span), was designed to analyze skills like word and letter decoding, memory, and English speaking and listening skill, which are cognitive components of reading ability.

The Solution: Ordinate's system delivered all the listening, speaking, memory, and decoding tasks in the RTOLD test over the telephone and performed a range of other functions, from response collection to completely automated analysis of oral English proficiency. Approximately 1,000 people took the RTOLD test in major cities across the United States, sampling readers from households and from adult education programs. The speaking components of the RTOLD test were scored automatically by Ordinate's system. The word decoding and memory sections of the RTOLD comprised standard performance tasks, which were built into Ordinate's testing system and automatically delivered by phone to subjects. Scoring of the letter and word decoding and memory responses were conducted at Harvard and ETS. This deployment demonstrated Ordinate's ability to provide a solution that combines its delivery system with the flexibility of both automatic and human scoring.

The Need: The U.S. Department of Education conducts a national study every year to analyze how well the nation's youth is progressing in basic academic areas (also known as "The Nation's Report Card"). The last major oral reading study, done in 1992 and administered by ETS/Westat, was delivered via tape recorders. The U.S. Department of Education needed a simple, dependable method to replicate that test and collect the student responses in 500 schools.

The Solution: Ordinate specified, designed, implemented, and tested a software system for NAEP which ran on notebook computers and was used to administer the tests. Students heard instructions over the computer and responded into a microphone. A test administrator navigated the software and handed reading and other materials to the student as required. Ordinate provided technical support to ETS during operation of the testing and during the transfer of data from the notebook computers. Ordinate set up listening/rating protocols through an Internet-based interface for scoring. Ordinate organized the response material into an appropriate hierarchical file structure and delivered it to ETS. Ordinate later produced additional automatic measures for the passage readings collected during the study. The measures represented three response features, Narrow Time, Initial WPM (Word Per Minute), and Run Rate. This project demonstrated Ordinate's ability to develop, deliver and administer a large-scale customized assessment that utilized computer delivery and its human rating management system.

The Need: The National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education intended to conduct a reading fluency supplement to the NAAL. The goal was to study basic reading in 18,000 adults across the nation to illuminate the processes that enable functional reading performances like passage comprehension and in particular to identify the skills that limit performance in the lowest level adult readers.

The Solution: Ordinate played two roles in the NAAL fluency study: (i) basic test development, and production delivery and scoring, and (ii) advanced data analysis, scaling studies and r eporting. First, Ordinate implemented a series of tasks to be administered via laptop. These required participants to read characters, lists of words and pseudo-words, and passages. The recorded responses to these tasks were transferred to Ordinate's database, then analyzed and scored automatically by Ordinate technology. The standard scoring provides information about the participant's reading rate, articulation rate, and fluency-related measures including incidence of short and long pauses, word deletions and false starts. The research elements include a finer automatic analysis of word reading accuracy, with derivation of new scale scores, and public reporting of analyses of the observed performance data. This assessment program demonstrated Ordinate's ability to develop, deliver and administer a large-scale customized assessment that utilized computer delivery, as well as automatic scoring and custom data analysis tools.