Educational Technology as a Catalyst for Change in the Global South

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Technology as a Catalyst for Change

Proposal

Educational Technology as a Catalyst for Change in the Global South

At the heart of the power to protest in education is ensuring access to quality education by marginalized learners and their teachers, especially those in the Global South, including girls, students from remote and disadvantaged communities, and those with special educational needs.

Need: Educational attainment worldwide is well short of the standard for quality education set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2019). As of 2019, 258 million children and youth were not in school, and 483 million children of primary and lower secondary school age lacked foundational reading skills after years spent in school (UIS, 2019). The world pandemic has only aggravated the learning crisis wiping out the gains made by global education efforts over the decades (UNESCO, 2021). The exorbitant costs of illiteracy to the global economy are estimated at USD $1.19 trillion each year but, the World Literacy Foundation states the real figure in terms of opportunity and human costs will never be known (Cree et al, 2022). After all, as a foundational skill, literacy forms the basis for personal achievement and overall societal success. It is critical that these skills develop early (Sparks et al., 2014) since students who are not reading at grade level by Grade 3 are at risk of failure in a variety of subject areas. Consequently, instruction needs to focus on early prevention and continuous support rather than later remediation.

Challenge: Finding ways to increase the quality of teaching has been a concern for educational systems globally but, particularly, in the contexts where there is overreliance on undifferentiated instruction such as basic recall, rote learning, and recitation (Bold et al., 2017). Effective and efficient teacher professional development (TPD) is the solution that enables sustainable transformations of teaching and learning at scale (Wolfenden, 2022). This entails 1) increasing the quality of teacher development, including better content, pedagogical knowledge, classroom skills and motivation; and 2) enhancing teaching methods and learning materials, including textbooks and other learning resources (Akyeampong, 2019).

We are addressing these challenges via the widespread and rigorous implementation of the interactive early literacy software AXXX and the digital library RXXXX, both available without charge. These tools are meant to be used in combination with effective practices of literacy teaching. To this end, teachers need both instructional skills and the confidence to succeed, and on a wide scale basis. Hence, we are researching new ways to conduct TPD that employ technology as a tool to enhance instruction.

About AXXX: Being evidence-based (NRP, 2000) and research-proven (Authors, 2020), AXXX software provides an engaging interactive environment for learning literacy aimed at beginning readers. Taking a balanced reading approach, the Student Module contains 33 alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and writing activities, many at different levels of difficulty and complexity. These instructional activities are linked to 20 interactive stories of various genres and a host of student-written stories. The Teacher module provides an array of multimedia support materials for teachers, including curriculum alignment aids, lesson plans, video teaching vignettes, and printable classroom resources. An Assessment feature enables teachers to review student and class performance on instructional activities. A Parent Module offers access to multimedia resources on how to support the use of AXXX in the home.

About RXXXX: While AXXX provides the fundamental building blocks for early reading, RXXXX extends that understanding and deepens personal interest via exposure to a rich collection of literature. This electronic library of free stories covers a variety of themes, genres, levels, countries, languages, and formats. Hence, through exposure to a diverse array of texts, skills could be practiced to automaticity (Stanovich et al., 2013). Available over the internet, via a local area network or on individual machines, RXXXX is tied to AXXX. Sample lesson plans are offered that focus on developing further students’ fluency and comprehension skills. RXXXX’s reading material from countries around the world ensures that students have access to content that reflects not only local interests but global ones—an opportunity to expand understanding of the wider world.

About the TPD Program: Our approach has focused on TPD mediated by technology. A blended literacy program has been designed around online interactive literacy modules (e.g., Alphabetics, Fluency, Comprehension. Each module is broken down into units, with some offered in person while others offered online using web conferencing. Ongoing online support is provided by seasoned AXXX teachers and through peers using mainstream Apps such as Whats App. Teacher submissions such as lesson plans are sent online to a central person. By using interactive multimedia, we ensure that teachers can actively manipulate the online content to be learned, which is quite different from traditional transmission methods of teaching and in-service professional development.

Progress to date: To learn about the effects of the TPD program on teachers’ instructional practices and students’ learning achievement, we completed a two-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study in Coastal and Western Kenya. It featured 11 teachers taking the blended TPD program and integrating AXXX/RXXXX in their teaching. Their classes were matched with 11 control classes where traditional ways of teaching reading were used. GRADE, a standardized test of reading achievement was used to measure student learning over time. The results (Figures 1) show that AXXX/RXXXX and TPD generated significant and important impacts on students’ reading ability. While all students learned, girls and students from rural areas benefitted substantially from AXXX/RXXXX implementation following TPD.
Figure 1




Overall, we have made significant strides in researching approaches to TPD, using a blended approach, with interactive multimedia at its core. In addition to positive gains in teachers’ literacy understanding and pedagogical skills and their impact on students’ reading ability, our successes also include 1) increases in TPD enrolment and retention rates surpassing those achieved when using a more structured Learning Management System approach; 2) governments responding favorably to our approach with a greater appetite for technology-based solutions; and 3) reinforcement of the critical importance of having a centralized, systematic system for data collection for both formative and summative purposes.

Authors

• Philip Abrami, Concordia University, Montreal

• Anne Wade, Concordia University

• Larysa Lysenko, CSLP/ Concordia Univerity

• Jennifer Head, Concordia University