BLAST is a game-based bilingual literacy assessment platform that uncovers students’ strengths, tracks their growth, and equips school and district leaders with the data needed to make informed decisions. Through BLAST, we are developing a corpus of oral assessment responses from bilingual and multilingual children. Each audio recording in the dataset is accompanied by a transcript and metadata that aims to support sociolinguistic and educational research. The planned metadata fields will include: child’s age, grade level, gender, ethnicity, geographical location, home language(s), type of educational program (e.g., dual language, monolingual), language in which each question was asked. Our goal is to support the development of culturally responsive assessment tools and AI models that reflect the strengths and needs of bilingual and multilingual learners in the U.S. and beyond.
Rocío Raña
Co-founder & CEO
Dr. Rocío Raña is the co-founder and CEO of BLAST, a research-based bilingual literacy assessment platform designed to empower bilingual and multilingual students and the educators that serve them. A linguist with over 15 years of experience in bilingual literacy research and assessment development, Dr. Raña earned her PhD from CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her work is informed by both her academic background and her personal experience as a mother of bilingual children navigating the U.S. school system. Under her leadership, BLAST is replacing traditional monolingual assessments with asset-based, data-driven bilingual tools that help school and district leaders make informed decisions and better support English learners and dual language programs.