New education tool: Tabs with literacy apps
After using the tabs for a year, children were tested on their understanding of 20 English words.
Tablets loaded with literacy apps may help
improve the reading skills of young children living in economically
disadvantaged communities, say scientists who have launched new trials of the
devices in India.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), Tufts University, and Georgia State University in the U.S.
examined the use of tablet computers loaded with literacy applications in a
range of educational environments.
One was set in a pair of rural Ethiopian
villages with no schools and no written culture; one was set in a suburban
South African school with a student-to-teacher ratio of 60 to one; and one was
set in a rural U.S. school with predominantly low-income students.
“The whole premise of our project is to
harness the best science and innovation to bring education to the world’s most
under resourced children,” said Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The researchers’ system consists of an
inexpensive tablet computer using Google’s Android operating system.
Researchers combed through the
early-childhood and literacy apps to identify several hundred that met their
quality criteria and addressed a broad enough range of skills to lay a
foundation for early reading education.
The researchers also developed their own
interface for the tablets. Across the three deployments, the tablets were
issued to children ranging in age from 4 to 11.
The Ethiopian trial involved children aged 4
to 11 who had no prior exposure to spoken English or any written language.
After a year using the tablets, children were
tested on their understanding of roughly 20 spoken English words, taken at
random from apps loaded on the tablets. More than half of the students knew at
least half the words, and all the students knew at least four. When presented
with strings of Roman letters in a random order, 90 per cent could identify at
least 10 of them, and all the children could supply the sounds corresponding to
at least two of them.
In the South African trial, rising second
graders who had been issued tablets the year before were able to sound out four
times as many words as those who had not, and in the U.S. trial, which involved
only 4-year-olds and lasted only four months, half-day pre-school students were
able to supply the sounds corresponding to nearly six times as many letters as
they had been before the trial.
Researchers have launched new trials in
Uganda, Bangladesh, India, and the U.S. —
Source | Business Line | 28 April 2016
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Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future
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The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
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