Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies

Overview: "The MILLEE research project aims to enhance access to literacy among children of school-going age in the developing world. More specifically, we aim to complement the formal schooling system by applying mobile learning technology to augment educational opportunities in out-of-school settings."

Social Problem: Poor literacy remains a decisive barrier to the economic empowerment of many people in the developing world. Mastery of English is the "single most influential factor that determines access to … important avenues of economic and social advancement” (Kishwar 2005). 90% of indigenous web content in India is in English. Field research and literature indicate that a large proportion of low-income populations desire to improve their command of an appropriate "world language" whether it be English, Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.
Two significant factors exacerbate the prob
lems of literacy: irregular school attendance owing to the need for students to work in the fields, homes, etc, and the the disinterest in schoolwork due to the perceived opportunity costs or lack of benefits of formal schooling. It was found that 43% to 61% of school-going-age children do not attend school regularly (Azim Premji Foundation 2004) Those students who do attend school are instructed by ESL teachers who are unable to communicate in English with Berkeley's researchers without the help of interpreters!

Envisioned Solution: Develop ESL learning games on cell phones that learners can use in out-of-school settings. The game-like design can improve the learning experience and encourage spontaneous adoption by students. They want to make ESL learning resources more accessible and form a curiculum based on local needs.

Early Development: A large scale evaluation by the Pratham NGO showed significant gains on mathematics test scores from playing computer game that target math learning. MILLEE had concluded three field studies between 2004-2005 with children in urban slums and rural areas to learn about their everyday learning and assess their broader needs. After interacting with 12 rural children intensively over a two-week period, they tested commercial ESL computer games on laptops that targeted vocabulary building and phonics instruction. Participants in grades 4-8 and aged 10-16
could barely read each letter in the English alphabet or decode words phonetically even after attending ESL for three years. Most learners encountered poor user-interface designs and had a lack of familiarily with a keyboard and mouse. Learners also struggled with games situated in certain settings like carnivals which were foreign to India. One of the members observed that some learners tended to guess or select every possible option until they obtained the correct answer, eradicating the educational benefit.

In spring 2006, the research group conducted more fieldwork in India to learn about how children use existing software and identify a list of functional literacies that were relevant to children's lives. The functional view of literacy where language is relevant to specific local contexts and practices and is widely acknowledged to be critical for language acceptance in developing regions. They used functional literacies to create relevant curriculum later. Using successful commercial learning packages as an example, they designed over 30 ESL learning games including crossword puzzles, word searches, hangman, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice games, matching games, and word scrambles.

Localization: The above designs suffered from localization-related problems when most of the team couldn't expand the shortlisted functional literacies into a suitable syllabus. ESL textbooks they had weren't structured according to shortlisted literacies either. In theory, localization should come after internationalization and take culturally independent components that are isolated from culturally dependent components and adapt them for the local context. Isolation and culturally independent components can then be adapted for various local contexts.

FRAMEWORK:

PATTERN is a "template" description of a solution to a problem that has been previously encountered and solved. The pattern allows for us to represent the steps the current language learning software takes to implement a learning task, which the learner engages in with the software to develop his or her language skills. An example of a pattern comprises of a receptive phase where the learner is taught new words, and an activation phase where the learner is tested on these words.

They used a sample of commercial language learning packages with a professional customer base, highly-educated users, and excellent ratings from previous purchasers on e-commerce, home-schooling and other websites. Their sample included Rosetta Stone, The Learning Company's Reader Rabbit, Scholastic's Clifford, etc. Handouts of pattern were distributed with over 50 patterns but they reviewed the collection to shortlist the patterns appropriate for learners -- they decided on phonetic decoding ("sounding out" letters and syllables, segment words into syllables), pronunciation, reading comprehension, and sight reading.




In the second goaround in 1006, they prioritized 9 learning activities for development on .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for the i-Mate SP5 smartphone because the ease of prototyping on that phone facilitated numerous rounds of iterative design. They designed every activity with receptive-activation cycles in which the receptive phase aims to develop the player's competence and the activation phase tests the player on the targeted aspect of the language. This phase tests the player on items that were "taught" during the preceding phase. Each activity had several short receptive-activation cycles that repeat until the curriculum is mastered. Players couldn't pass until they were correct thrice. Score keeping now included penalties for wrong answers to prevent students from picking each answer.

CURRICULUM AND EXERCISE result from associating the two and letting the learner interact directly with the educational software. Separating the activity from surriculum promotes reuse and scalability by: (1) creating curriculums independent of their cultural backgrounds that can be reused with different activities that have more culturally appropriate user interfaces, (2) reusing curriculums with different activities to appeal to more than one age group, (3) reuse activities with good interfaces as much as possible since learnability and usability are such big issues and (4) reuse localized curriculums such as a vocabulary list that is culturally meaningful for a given learner community with different activities -- one activity can focus on listening comprehension, another can focus on pronunciation and different activities within the same vocabulary list.
In 2006, 21 curricula were developed that covered the English alphabet and functional literacies such as numbers, dates and time, shopping, traveling, nature and social situations. 14 kindergarten and 1st grade children were trained to play the ESL learning games and they made changes to the games -- added a repeat sound button, changed the text displays to smiley and frown to make it easier on students and included more animations. It was hard to measure the results without a post-test but some students completed 3 exercises which means they would have had to have learned all the letters. Because the teachers were hinting at answers to the kids, they didn't find it useful to conduct a post-test and most of the children already knew the alphabet anyway.
A second user study with 11 6th grade students taught every participant text input just by observation even though it was their first experience with cell phones. As participants began to finish the 12 exercises, the ones who lagged behind were reluctant to finish or quit playing. Enthusiasm and fun died down once it became competitive. As the developers were more comfortable with this teacher, they conducted a post test, in which learners exhibited post-test gains of 4.3 out of 12 points. They tested for transfer by asking students to write a story but they didn't have the resources to test everyone. Students used Hindi words where they didn't know the English ones but mostly, they succeeded.




Source: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Emattkam/publications/CHI2007a.pdf