Phase 2
Goals
The next field study was aimed at quantitatively investigating how regular use of the Reading Tutor affected the reading proficiency of children from three different socio-economic backgrounds in Accra. It was implemented from May to October 2007, in collaboration with the Kofi-Annan Centre for Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE) in Accra, Ghana.
In addition to this work in Ghana we also explored the use of the Reading Tutor in an in-school setting with partners in Mongu, Zambia in Summer 2008.
Participants
In Ghana, Eighty-nine children in grades two through four from three different schools participated in the controlled study. These schools were a private school in a middle-income area, a public school in a low-income area, and an informal educational program for disadvantaged children who have not attended formal school. The children used the Reading Tutor in computer labs at AITI-KACE, where they were bussed each day from their schools. While the children from the private school all have prior familiarity with computers, the children from the other two schools did not. In addition, the children from the private and public schools had a fairly good command of the English language, whereas most children in the educational program for disadvantaged children had significant difficulties with the English language. Finally, the children from the private school were on average fluent readers going into the study, the children from the public school were not as fluent, and the last group of children had very little reading ability.
In Zambia, we worked with a school in Mongu to explore the feasibility of the tool in an in-school setting. The school already had a room set up as a computer lab and we demonstrated the tool to several teachers and students, providing them with an opportunity to try out the tool firsthand.
Findings
The controlled study in Ghana showed that the Reading Tutor was most effective with children from the public school. With this group, the improvement in reading ability over a two-month period for children who used the Reading Tutor was significantly greater than that for children who did not use the reading tutor over the same period. Over the two-month usage period, the Reading Tutor appeared to be less effective with children from the informal educational program, and did not appear to result in improvements in reading proficiency with the children from the private school.
The Ghana study also revealed that school attendance was an important variable in this process: the reading ability for some children deteriorated over the vacation period. This deterioration was less for children who used the Reading Tutor than for those who did not. From the findings of the study, we can hypothesize that the Reading Tutor was at an appropriate level to further develop the reading skills of the children from the public school. It might have been too easy for the children from the private school who were already fluent readers, and too difficult for the children in the informal education program who had many difficulties with English.
These findings were reported in the following publication of the ICTD2009 Conference Proceedings:
"Improving Child Literacy in Africa: Experiments with an Automated Reading Tutor," by G. Ayorkor Mills-Tettey, Jack Mostow, M. Bernardine Dias, Tracy Morrison Sweet, Sarah M. Belousov, Malcolm Frederick Dias, and Haijun Gong.
3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009), April 2009.
Next Steps
Project Kane began with a series of field studies in Ghana and Zambia, exploring the viability and effectiveness of an automated reading tutor in helping children improving their reading skills in English. Following up on the lessons learned from the initial field studies, the current thrust of TechBridgeWorld's work in this area is the development of new technological tools for literacy.
Please visit TechBridgeWorld's TechCaFE project website for details on our new work in educational tools for literacy and other topics.
