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Tablets have the potential to become the new teachers
Tablets loaded with literacy apps may be instrumental in improving the reading skills of young children from economically disadvantaged communities, say scientists who have launched new trials in India.
Tablets loaded with literacy apps may be instrumental in improving the reading skills of young children from economically disadvantaged communities, say scientists who have launched new trials in India.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts University, and Georgia State University in the U.S. conducted a study where tablet computers loaded with literacy applications were used in a range of educational environments.
The first instance was in a pair of rural Ethiopian villages with no schools and no written culture whatsoever; the second one was set in a suburban South African school with a student-to-teacher ratio of 60: 1; and lastly one was set in a rural U.S. school with students from predominantly low-income families…
“The whole premise of our project is to harness the best science and innovation to bring education to the worlds most under resourced children,” said Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Upon zeroing in on an inexpensive tablet computer using Google’s Android operating system the researchers sifted through early-childhood and literacy apps to identify several hundred that and addressed a broad enough range of skills to lay a foundation for early reading education.
Along with that, the researchers also developed their own interface for the tablets considering ease of access and usage. Across the 3 geographies, the tablets were issued to children ranging from 4 to 11 years of age.
After a year of 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 50% 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 % could identify at least 10 of them, and all the children could supply the sounds corresponding to at least 2 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.