By Jennifer Baljko Translation: Miao Keyan, Zhu Jincheng, Ding Qianru
Throughout early 2018, Ruhi often refused to go to daycare, which caused a lot of problems for her parents. Sapena Roy, a staff member at the daycare centre in the Mahavir Enclave area of Delhi, India, recalls: "At the beginning, I was trying every day to persuade Ruhi to come to the centre, but then something changed. Ruhi began to appear daily at daycare centers. She came here early and was excited to hear stories, paint and watch puppet shows.
What triggered this change? That year, the Read to Kids program expanded from a pilot program among parents and child caregivers to daycare centres in India. The way adults use mobile apps to read hundreds of books to children has inspired Ruhi and hundreds of thousands of other children like her in New Delhi to love learning.
Roy says "reading to children" has had a major impact on children like Ruhi. Absenteeism has dropped because kids don't want to miss storytime. Children are more willing to express their ideas than before, and dynamic reading interactions also allow children to develop reading habits in the classroom and at home. ”
Ruhi's newfound love for books is exactly what global learning company Pearson, Literacy Advocates Worldreader and global development partner Results for Development (R4D) expected when they created the "Read to Children" India pilot project in 2015. The pilot project, which covered 203,000 households around New Delhi over a two-year period, has successfully driven the expansion of the project to the rest of India, North Africa, including Jordan, Peru and the Middle East.
Based on decades of collaborative experience, these organizations know that making children lifelong readers requires patience and persuasion. But they learned from the "Read to Children" program that in countries where a reading culture has not been established, encouraging parents and child caregivers in low-income communities to read to young children is particularly challenging.
"This project is the first time ever that someone has tried to figure out how mobile phones can be used to change parents' behavior and encourage more parent-child interaction and more reading activities for children." Says Annya Crane, a global program manager and behavior change management expert at The World Readers' Organization based in San Francisco.
The "Read to Children" pilot project was successful through a diverse partnership between international and local organizations, a continued focus on behaviour change, and a hybrid, cross-sectoral approach to development based on a willingness to learn, adapt and adapt.
The Read for Kids India pilot project stems from a shared interest of both Pearson and World Readers to improve global literacy and provide cost-effective access to books in hard-to-find areas.
The explosion of digital devices around the world has enabled these organizations to reach more children. Readers' Organization estimates that 250 million children in low- and middle-income countries are not prepared to attend school. This organization hopes to give these children an edge in school and life by reading aloud to their children. Pearson and Readers' Organizations have previously collaborated to deliver Pearson-produced content through Readersworld's e-reader projects in schools and libraries across Africa. In early 2015, Pearson and Readers world continued to collaborate with a view to improving literacy among Indians.
These organizations are committed to transforming India's very popular mobile phones into mobile libraries with hundreds of e-books. They want to discover how parents can read aloud to their children on their phones and encourage new ways to improve their children's readiness to school. The World Readers' Organization estimates that many Indian children are not prepared before school; 57.5 per cent of third-graders are unable to read first-grade texts.
Pearson Group, the project's lead funder, provided approximately $1.4 million to Readers World for a two-year pilot project from 2015 to 2017, plus $600,000 for the expansion of the project in 2018 and 2019. World Readers also raised about $250,000 in funding for the project and spread those funds between 2015 and 2019.
The World Readers Organization is the main project designer and technology provider for the project, offering its digital content portfolio and experience in creating digital readers in 51 countries. Most of the money from the Read to Kids project is allocated to the Behavior Change Campaign and mobile app development projects.
Results for Development, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, joined Pearson and Readers worldwide in May 2015 to oversee and evaluate. From 2015 to 2017, Pearson paid $240,000 to the nonprofit as an evaluation and learning partner for the Read to Children program. "From the outset, we have invested heavily in ensuring that investing in this project has a real impact on families, while drawing on deep learning experiences to serve the global literacy community so that the project can be replicated elsewhere." Jennifer Young Perlman, Head of Innovation and Collaboration at Pearson Group, said.
After finding a key partner, Readers began developing the World Readers' Organization Children's App in mid-2015 to create a child-friendly interface that turns mobile phones into reading devices. This app was beta tested in 2016 and contains a culturally sensitive, age-appropriate collection of e-books with 550 Hindi and English children's storybooks that parents can download via the Internet. Readers worldwide sources books from 34 local and international publishers, including Pearson, Pratham Books and katha, Tulika, Eklavya and others.
In the pilot project, local and international partners targeted parents in low-income communities who had literacy or semi-literacy abilities who had smartphones and sent their children to low-cost schools. The organizations wanted to understand how these parents used their phones and how the country's storytelling traditions reinforced reading habits.
These organisations have also partnered with creative, developmental, educational, government and healthcare organisations in Delhi, such as the Society for All Round Development (SARD) and the Hindustan Latex Family Planning Promotion Trust (HLFPPT) to better understand mobile phone usage patterns. Determine which families are most likely to expect this project and how best to convey the core message – "Today's story is preparing for tomorrow".
In late 2015 and early 2016, the team received its first set of findings through initial planning meetings and three months of field research, including data collection and interviews and surveys with child caregivers. They found something surprising. For example, Hindi lacks some simple words — not even "read" and "reading." In Hindi, padhna or padhai karna means to read or learn, but they refer to academic research. In most Indian families, there are no concepts such as "story time" and "reading" for children to develop literary literacy.
"In India, the culture of oral storytelling is prevalent, but in this culture, reading to children at home is not the norm." Molly Jamieson Eberhardt, project leader for "Growing to Fruition," said Molly Jamieson Eberhardt. "We realized early on that the parents who took part in our survey interpreted 'reading at home with their children' as supervised assignments, which is not an act we are trying to encourage and has little to do with our target audience, the children (of 0-8 years old). This is not a matter of text comprehension, but of culturally influenced misreading. ”
Words associated with India's deep tradition of oral storytelling are a better choice. Using an app called Read to Children to tell children a story became the focus of the next behavioral change effort.
Essentially, each new insight is an opportunity to re-evaluate previous assumptions, and when the data deviates from the team's expectations, the next phase of the goal is readjusted. This is both the cornerstone of an adaptive learning strategy of "getting results toward development" and the foundation for helping children develop their reading.
This iterative approach was a huge success. Wendy Smith, Head of Education Programs at Readers' World Organization, said: "We and our partners have introduced data-based decision-making through learning labs. This helped them quickly think about how to adapt the program to better engage parents and child caregivers. ”
In addition, quarterly study checks proved to be very valuable. Every three months, a face-to-face meeting is held with key local partners – social development organizations, Hindustan Latex Family Planning Promotion Trust and Katha – to gather insights on how users can change their reading behavior, how they share stories with their children, and what challenges they face when using the app.
"Community engagement is difficult. Changing behavior is difficult. This kind of behavior-changing project has never been tried before," said Luke Heinkel, a senior program official at "Toward Development for Results," "We don't know what the outcome will be, but we agreed to take strict measures in terms of how we learn and what to learn." ”
At the end of the pilot project, Read to Kids directly supported 15,000 families from 177 low-income communities in Delhi through one-to-one and group-set app use training sessions. Mass media campaigns and behavior change messaging campaigns in the region are estimated to have attracted 17 million people, while also attracting 188,000 app users. According to a project report by the World Reader Organization, nearly 7,000 households have become "frequent readers", reading at least four times a month, which is an indicator of reading habit formation and behavior change.
"If we start this project with ambitions to scale up children's reading even before we know firsthand what the key barriers to early reading are and whether mobile technology can overcome them, then we will miss important steps in the learning cycle and will not be able to successfully replicate the project in more communities in other countries like India or even Jordan." Jan Perlman said.
In 2017, World Readers launched the "Tuta Tuta" pilot project in Jordan, which reached more than 50,000 families affected by refugees or conflict. Building on the findings of the "Read to Children" study, Tuta Tuta shows how regular reading and selecting books can address the social and emotional needs of children in crisis situations.
"Social and emotional learning has now become mainstream in the World Readers' Organization program," Smith added, "and what we've learned from Jordan shows that many parents believe there are strong emotional benefits to reading to their children and are looking for books to support this." ”
Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review, first published in the summer of 2020 Scaling Story Time Written by Jennifer Baljko, a barcelona-based freelance writer. Her articles have been published in Devex, Fortune, Inbound Logistics, and various business and travel publications. She recently completed a three-and-a-half-year trekking tour across Asia and Europe and wrote a blog post about the experience bangkokbarcelonaonfoot.com.