A grant from the National Science Foundation will help launch a new interdisciplinary field of study in spoken language technology for education. The one-year “Building Partnerships for Education and Speech Research” project will unite the extensive education research and educational technology backgrounds at the Concord Consortium and SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) and bring them together with two of the strongest groups in spoken language technology research, the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory at SRI and the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS) at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The sophistication of technologies for processing and understanding spoken language—such as speech recognition, detection of individual speakers, and natural language processing—have radically improved in recent years, though most people’s image of modern spoken language technology is colored by often-finicky interactions with Siri or Google products. In fact, many lesser-known technologies can now automatically detect many features of speech, including question asking, dialog interchanges, word counts, indication of emotion or stress, and specific spoken keywords with high accuracy.

However, educational research has barely begun exploring their potential to provide insight into, and eventually revolutionize, research areas as diverse as collaboration, argumentation, discourse analysis, emotion, and engagement. And capturing the most critical and substantive interactions during the teaching and learning process—the discourse and conversation among students, teachers, and mentors—remains elusive.

The central goal of this new project is to generate interest in and momentum toward the use of spoken language technologies in education research. The potential for such applied technologies is vast, and the broader impacts could be significant. As these technologies become established for use in improved education research and development, researchers will be able to better understand and target interventions, educators will be able to monitor and adjust their interactions with learners, and learners will be better informed of their learning progress.