Collective Support and Independent Learning with a Voice-Based Literacy Technology in Rural Communities

Madaio, Michael; Yarzebinski, Evelyn; Kamath, Vikram; Zinszer, Benjamin D.; Hannon-Cropp, Joelle; Tanoh, Fabrice; Akpe, Yapo Hermann; Seri, Axel Blahoua; Jasińska, Kaja K.; Ogan, Amy

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376276

Cited by 24 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(64 reference statements)

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“…Here we report three non-linguistic visual statistical learning experiments that we adapted to be deployable in settings with limited technological resources and culturally relevant for children in rural Côte d'Ivoire. This work extends baseline language and literacy testing for an ongoing literacy intervention in this region (Madaio et al, 2019a(Madaio et al, , 2019b(Madaio et al, , 2020. Understanding how SL supports literacy acquisition is important for situating literacy in a global context by offering insight into how children use their domain-general abilities to develop emergent literacy skills in a profoundly different educational system than those studied in HIC contexts.…”

Section: Statistical Learning In Cȏte D'ivoirementioning

confidence: 66%

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Zinszer¹,

Hannon²,

Kouadio³

et al. 2020

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Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in statistical learning tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed tasks, 157 children in rural communities surrounding the Adzópe region in Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but in a post-test, their discrimination between valid and invalid sequences did not exceed chance. Overall, their responses were slower than U.S. children completing a similar task (Qi et al., 2019), and these individual differences in processing speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. Moreover, the weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language further suggests that this task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as in previous samples. We recommend adaptations to the statistical learning paradigm that may improve its generalizability across the wider global population.

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Section: Statistical Learning In Cȏte D'ivoirementioning

confidence: 66%

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Zinszer¹,

Hannon²,

Kouadio³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Before the strikes, Eneza Education implemented a mobile learning technology, Allô Alphabet, designed by a team of researchers specialized in human-computer interaction and reading development, to target younger children with gaps in fundamental literacy skills (Madaio, Kamath, et al, 2019) who would be unlikely to be able to read SMS messages, unlike the users of Shupavu291 (Figure 4). A 4-month study of the efficacy of Allô Alphabet in 16 schools in eight villages (Madaio et al, 2020) coincided with the 2-month-long teacher strike. While Allô Alphabet was designed to be an at-home learning intervention, it was not clear how sustained school closures would affect families' adherence to a learning intervention.…”

Section: Case Study 2: Early Literacy Learning During Teacher Strikes In Côte D'ivoirementioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile Learning During School Disruptions in Sub-Saharan Africa

et al. 2021

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School closures due to teacher strikes or political unrest in low-resource contexts can adversely affect children’s educational outcomes and career opportunities. Phone-based educational technologies could help bridge these gaps in formal schooling, but it is unclear whether or how children and their families will use such systems during periods of disruption. We investigate two mobile learning technologies deployed in sub-Saharan Africa: a text-message-based application with lessons and quizzes adhering to the national curriculum in Kenya (N = 1.3 million), and a voice-based platform for supporting early literacy in Côte d’Ivoire (N = 236). We examine the usage and beliefs surrounding unexpected school closures in each context via system log data and interviews with families about their motivations and methods for learning during the disruption. We find that mobile learning is used as a supplement for formal and informal schooling during disruptions with equivalent or higher intensity, as parents feel responsible to ensure continuity in schooling.

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“…The major issue with such a way of thinking in HCI4D is that it has become hegemonic as it is now framed in the name of doing socially good research that stereotype African condition as dystopia and Western situations as utopia. Other examples of saviourism mentality of postcolonial design thinking can be identified in the design and deployment of technological interventions meant for specific African settings (e.g., [112,113,146,198]). This often takes the form of engaging in bungee research activities that export pseudo-solutions to problems that might not even exist [55] and unfortunately by the same mechanisms that define and marginalize them in the first place.…”

Section: Saviourism Of Alternative To Postcolonialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

No More “Solutionism” or “Saviourism” in Futuring African HCI: A Manyfesto

Adamu

2023

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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Research in HCI4D has continuously advanced a narrative of ‘lacks’ and ‘gaps’ of the African perspective in technoscience. In response to such misguided assumptions, this paper attempts to reformulate the common and perhaps unfortunate thinking about African practices of design in HCI4D – i.e., largely as a function of African societal predicaments and Western technocratic resolutions. Through critical reflection on a range of issues associated with post-colonialism and post-development, I examine the possibilities that various historical tropes might offer to the reinvention of the African perspective on innovation. This leads to the consideration of how engaging in critical discussions about the future dimensions of African HCI can allow for grappling with the effect of the coloniality of being, power and knowledge. Developing on the ideas of futuring as a way of dealing with the complexities of the present – in this case the coloniality of the imagination - the paper ends by discussing three tactical propositions for ‘remembering’ future identities of African innovation where the values of autonomy are known and acted upon.

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Collective Support and Independent Learning with a Voice-Based Literacy Technology in Rural Communities

Cited by 24 publications

References 61 publications

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Mobile Learning During School Disruptions in Sub-Saharan Africa

No More “Solutionism” or “Saviourism” in Futuring African HCI: A Manyfesto

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