AI-Assisted Screening of Oral Reading in Primary School: Using Short Recordings to Flag Reading Difficulty in Greek Pupils

Early identification of reading difficulties enables timely classroom intervention; however, teachers often have limited time and restricted access to specialist assessment. This study explores a brief, teacher-friendly screening approach based on short oral reading recordings to support classroom decision-making. Oral reading samples were collected from 77 Greek primary school pupils (Grades 3–6) during a standardized reading task. Recordings were segmented into 7 s excerpts, converted into spectrogram images, and analyzed using a deep learning model to classify each excerpt as indicative of reading difficulties or not. To reflect realistic school implementation, model development followed an 80/20 participant-level split, with validation conducted on pupils not included in the training set. At the selected operating threshold, the model achieved approximately 84% overall accuracy and a balanced accuracy of 0.85. For practical applicability, a pupil-level indicator—representing the proportion of excerpts flagged as difficult—showed a strong association with expert judgments (r ≈ 0.74). These findings suggest that brief oral reading recordings can provide teachers with an interpretable screening signal to inform monitoring, prioritization, and early classroom support while underscoring the need for further validation under routine school conditions.