Literacy

Where textbooks are in short supply, restricted internet access can help: U of T researcher

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 14:32:05 +0000

Where textbooks are in short supply, restricted internet access can help: U of T researcher

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 04/04/2022 - 10:32

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(Photo by NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Topic

Breaking Research

Literacy

Rotman School of Management

U of T Mississauga

Smartphones are often seen as a distraction in schools, but a new study co-authored by a ��Ƶ development economist suggests they can be useful in under-resourced institutions – under the right conditions.

A paper co-written by Laura Derksen, of U of T Mississauga and the Rotman School of Management, showed that some high school students in Malawi who were given restricted access to Wikipedia via smartphones after school and on weekends improved their English and biology exam scores.

The study, conducted with Catherine Michaud-Leclerc of Laval University and Pedro C.L. Souza of Queen Mary University of London, recently appeared in The Journal of Development Economics.

“Teachers and policy-makers have viewed the internet as a problem,” says Derksen, an assistant professor of strategic management.

“We wanted to show that if you can carve out the part of the internet that is both compelling for teenagers and educational, you can get the best of it while not getting the worst of it.”

The researchers worked with students of mixed socioeconomic status at four government-run boarding schools in Malawi between 2017 and 2018 – a time when the southeastern African country of roughly 20 million was on the cusp of widespread internet adoption.

Laura Derksen

Researchers gave 300 randomly chosen secondary students access to a “digital library” after school and on weekends during the school year, where they could use an Android smartphone to access Wikipedia and Wiktionary exclusively. The students didn't have alternative access to the internet.

Under the supervision of research staff, students were able to browse privately using nicknames to ensure anonymity, and they were allowed to take notes.

Though students spent more than an hour a week in the digital library, they spent most of their time researching subjects unrelated to course material, the researchers say.

Anonymized browsing data showed that students looked up topics ranging from philosophy to sports, music and entertainment. Among school subjects, biology, physics and chemistry were the most popular, in that order.

Although the students surfed Wikipedia broadly, they performed no worse on their exams – but the low achievers did better in English and biology. The researchers observed no effect in any subject among high achievers.

Since most students' internet activity was not school-related, researchers speculated that the English gains may have been due to students spending more time reading. Biology was the top-researched subject during the 22 per cent of the time they spent on school-related pages.

“They read about everything,” Derksen says. “You would see the same student jumping around to entertainment, to news, to sex, to something for school, to quantum physics.”

Students said they trusted what they were reading, especially in important topics prone to misinformation or not always covered in textbooks, such as world news and safe sex. They also preferred Wikipedia to other sources of information for general interest topics – and even over their biology textbooks.

The study suggests there's potential for under-resourced countries with low high school competition rates to supplement donated books with online material. Providing high school students with restricted internet access via smartphone costs roughly US$4 per student per month, the researchers say.

“It’s not that expensive to buy a set of smartphones,” Derksen says. “The schools have staff who can manage them. It’s a low-cost, high-benefit intervention for poor countries.”

Educator and public speaker David Booth 'really thought teaching was the best and most important profession'

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 17:48:00 +0000

Educator and public speaker David Booth 'really thought teaching was the best and most important profession'

noreen.rasbach Thu, 02/14/2019 - 12:48

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Professor Emeritus David Booth at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 2016 for its 50th anniversary (photo courtesy of OISE)

Topic

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Professor Emeritus David Booth was an influential educator, prolific author, and staunch advocate for literacy who saw the value in all forms of reading, from classic literature to social media postings.

For more than 30 years, Booth taught and mentored undergraduate and graduate students at the ��Ƶ's Faculty of Education and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, spreading his enthusiasm to generations of teachers. His influence went far beyond U of T, as he wrote dozens of books and gave hundreds of presentations and speeches around the world.

He died on Dec. 22 at the age of 80.

Booth’s many books ranged from children’s stories to poetry anthologies to literacy guides for teachers and principals. Some were designed to help teachers integrate poetry or drama into the classroom, others dealt with how to get boys to read, and one was a handbook to help schools challenge censorship and book bans. His last book, What is a ‘Good’ Teacher, was written with Richard Coles and published in 2017.

But it was as an inspirational public speaker that he may have had the most impact. In his presentations, he was enthusiastic about teaching, unequivocally supported teachers, and showed he understood what they were up against, particularly on the subject of reading and literacy. His presentations at educational conferences were full of humour and understanding of teachers’ challenges, and showed deep empathy for the children they were teaching.

Booth’s lectures and talks were legendary, and teachers who heard him speak were inspired by his message. Sheilah Currie, a teacher who is the president and founder of the ReadUP Reading Clubs for children in east-central Toronto, said she first heard Booth speak when she was doing her teacher training. “He was funny, and empathetic…his talks were just very, very engaging.”

David Booth, with his grandchildren Mara and E.J. (photo courtesy of Booth family)

Years later, Currie asked Booth to be on her board. He agreed because “he knew the problem with literacy, and how at-risk children often fall through the cracks.”

Currie said Booth was a highly effective “cheerleader” for her organization. “He was a much-loved member of our board, bringing lightness and laughter to our meetings, contributing great ideas, and making us all feel that we were doing noble work.” Booth, she said, was “one of those rare people who lifts up others and makes them feel they are special when, in reality, I think it’s David who was special.”

Booth was effective at getting his message across because he loved teachers and wanted to help them get better at their jobs, said Glen Jones, the dean of OISE. “He really thought teaching was the best and most important profession,” and he offered practical advice that could be used in the classroom.

Jones said he has received dozens of notes from Booth’s former students since his death. “They wanted someone at OISE to know how David Booth had changed their lives.”

One of Booth’s areas of expertise was how to influence reluctant readers. In a 2010 paper, he noted that too many parents and teachers regard only novels, poetry and literary non-fiction as proper reading. “Many boys and men think that they are not readers because they don’t choose one of those genres,” but that is a mistake, he wrote. Graphic novels, sports stories, and even video-game manuals or text on a screen are all legitimate forms of reading, he argued. The key is to make sure people think carefully about what they do read, and become “critical and discerning readers.”

David Hutchison, a former graduate student of Booth’s who is now a professor of educational studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., said Booth “really thought outside the box. He wasn’t dismissive of the emergence of the new social media and the different ways young people are communicating. He embraced that and found ways to integrate that into literacy development for them.”

Booth worked closely with academics who focused on literacy methods, and with classroom teachers with boots on the ground, said Dan Tobin, president of Stenhouse Publishers, which handled many of his books in the United States. “He really spanned that bridge between theory and practice as well as anybody I know.”

His books, Tobin said, were “practical, with innovative ideas and solid theory, but also so many practical suggestions.”

In one of Booth’s books, called Exploding the Reading, he got 1,000 students to study a 200-year-old folktale and then interpret the text. The analysis underlined how readers of different ages interact with a story, and was a highly innovative way to delve into the relationship between writer and reader, Tobin said.

Many of Booth’s books were collaborations, as he strongly believed in getting ideas and voices from as many sources and angles as possible, Tobin said. Overall, Booth was “an evangelist for reading, for good literacy practices, for teachers and their importance in the field, and for student voices. He was an articulate spokesperson on all levels. Everybody knew David Booth and knew his work and had great affection for him.”

Tobin said Booth had a dry sense of humour and was very entertaining, but was also bit of a contrarian. “He was kind of a cheerful curmudgeon.”

David Wallace Booth was born in Sarnia, Ont. in 1938. He took his teacher training at McMaster University in Hamilton, and began teaching drama in Hamilton area schools in 1960. Later he taught summer drama programs in universities across North America and around the world.

Booth’s early work teaching drama boosted his skills as a speaker, said Jones. “He was a dramatic soul. One of the reasons he was regarded as an outstanding public speaker was this dramatic bent. He was a master of the raised eyebrow and the dramatic pause.”

Booth completed a graduate degree at the University of Durham in the U.K., and later earned a diploma in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Oxford. After working as a school board consultant in Toronto, he joined the ��Ƶ’s Faculty of Education in the early 1970s. He was with the faculty when it merged with OISE in 1996. From 2008 to 2012, Booth was chair of the centre for literacy at Nipissing University in North Bay.

“He really thought teaching was the best and most important profession,” OISE Dean Glen Jones said about David Booth

Booth had one son, Jay, who is often mentioned in his writing, especially in his work on literacy and boys. In an introduction to his 2002 book Even Hockey Players Read, Booth said his motivation was to “look at the literacy world that my son finds himself in as a young adult male.”

Jay said his father was “incredibly caring, patient and supportive. He was exactly the same with his grandchildren – even the smallest thing was always a big deal to him and he always was so proud and supportive of everything they did.”

Booth always found time to help out friends and family if they needed him, no matter how hectic his work schedule, Jay said. “He was the busiest person I knew, and somehow he was still always there for everyone.”

Booth’s longtime friend and colleague Larry Swartz, a literacy consultant and OISE instructor, said Booth provided the people around him with wisdom, support, and laughs. “His teachings and insights came from working with students, in his own classroom, as a consultant, and as a professor,” Swartz said. “He would find the gem within any student, young or old, and he would shape that.”

Booth gave positive, uplifting advice to anyone who asked, Swartz said. “He was authentic, and he had a never-give-up outlook on life.”

David Booth leaves his brother Jack, son Jay, and two grandchildren. There will be a celebration of his life at U of T in the spring.

How do you spot bogus news? Ask U of T Libraries

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 17:45:12 +0000

How do you spot bogus news? Ask U of T Libraries

geoff.vendeville Tue, 11/29/2016 - 12:45

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A fake news story that was widely read during the U.S. presidential race

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Did the Pope endorse Donald Trump for president? Did Hillary Clinton sell weapons to ISIS? Is Justin Trudeau actually the son of Fidel Castro?

No. But that hasn't stopped these fictitious stories from spreading via fake news websites.

In recent weeks there has been an outcry over the spread of fake news and its influence in the U.S. presidential election. This month, Google and Facebook decided to put restrictions on websites peddling fake or misleading content.

Even university students can be fooled by bogus headlines. That’s why ��Ƶ librarians have made a concise online guide to verify news stories.

To help students think more critically about news stories, librarians Eveline Houtman and Heather Buchansky added a section to the library’s FAQ page with links to myth-debunking sources like Snopes.com, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. There's also information from Melissa Zimdar's site about spotting fake news. She's an assistant professor of communications and media at Merrimack College in the U.S.

U of T Librarians Eveline Houtman and Heather Buchansky are helping curtail the spread of fake news by giving students online resources to spot bogus news sites (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

“I think anybody can be fooled, to be honest,” said Houtman, a reference librarian at Robarts Library and coordinator of undergraduate instruction. “Education levels seem to help, but we deal with a lot of students barely out of high school and they need a lot of help learning to be more critical.”

The librarians suggest checking a website’s domain name and About Us page before taking what they say as fact. But that isn’t always enough to tell if a news story is genuine.

One clue is how the story makes you feel, Houtman said.

“Is it evoking outrage in you? Maybe just be careful of having your buttons pushed and being manipulated too easily,” she said.

The guide to spotting fake news was published Friday and has gotten positive reactions, said Buchansky, the university’s student engagement librarian.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at U of T Scarborough and former managing editor at CBC Radio, says that even if students are highly media literate these days, they can still make mistakes like everybody else.

In a turbulent period and with a tidal wave of information online, readers can be overwhelmed, he continued. “And when they’re overwhelmed, they retreat to the parts of the Internet that reflect their own concerns and biases.

Snopes.com disputes fake news stories that President Obama had called for the dismantling of the Statue of Liberty

He added that media and universities have "an obligation to help sort out what is reliable information and what is not. Because without that kind of awareness, there's a lot at stake.”

For example, in the final months of the presidential race, many Americans relied on non-mainstream sources of information, Dvorkin said.

One analysis by Buzzfeed showed that readers engaged with fake election news more than they did with stories from trusted outlets like The New York Times in the three months before election day.

As a rule, readers should adopt a healthy skepticism of everything, Dvorkin said.

“We need to put all ideas to a certain amount of testing and do it in a comprehensive and humane way.”

If a news story sounds too good to be true, it probably is, he advised.

Read The Varsity's op-ed on the importance of media literacy in an age of fake news

U of T grads in finals for Hult Prize – with talking stickers to boost literacy for impoverished children

sgupta — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 09:46:30 +0000

U of T grads in finals for Hult Prize – with talking stickers to boost literacy for impoverished children sgupta Fri, 09/18/2015 - 05:46

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Attollo team members Jamie Austin, Peter Cinat, Aisha Bukhari and Lak Chinta (photo by Roberta Baker)

Noreen Ahmed-Ullah

Author legacy

Noreen Ahmed-Ullah

Topic

With a week left before Hult Prize finals at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting, U of T’s Team Attollo is gaining momentum, finding partners in India and Africa and picking up interest from educational organizations.

The innovation driving all the excitement? That's “Talking Stickers,” the system created by the team to improve literacy for impoverished children around the world.

One of only six teams left from more than 20,000 entrants in the world’s largest student competition on global challenges, the social entrepreneurs developed a handheld scanner called ollo which uses stickers with QR codes to bring words to life through songs, nursery rhymes and short stories. It's been attracting media attention locally and in developing countries around the world where they've been testing the product.

(Listen to the CBC Radio story on Metro Morning.)

If they win the finals Sept. 26, at an event hosted by former President Bill Clinton in New York City, the team gets $1 million in seed capital funds that will go toward building the social startup and putting affordable Attollo devices into the market.

For team members Aisha Bukhari, Peter Cinat, Lak Chinta and Jamie Austin, it’s been a long road since winning the U of T competition back in December. Between them, the group has three engineering degrees, two PhDs in neuroscience and four MBAs, but they’ve had to learn new skills like how to make a pithy business pitch and how to capture investor and media interest.

(Video below created by REfilms for Attollo.)

Talking Stickers by Atollo from Janelle & Steve Miller on Vimeo.

In March, they won the Hult regional rounds in Dubai. They’ve all left their full time jobs to focus on the startup, going through several reincarnations of their initial idea, absorbing advice from profs and other social entrepreneurs and tweaking their product.

But it’s been worth it for the group. With this year’s competition focused on early childhood development in the urban slum, team members say they feel their Attollo device has a real shot at reducing illiteracy in the developing world.

“Studies show that underprivileged children are exposed to 30 million fewer words by the age of 3 compared to their more privileged counterparts – this has a big impact on their vocabulary,” said Attollo team member Austin.

“By the time these children reach school, this gap widens to the point where they struggle to succeed in school and then later in life. We traveled to India and Kenya, and we found that the concept of the word gap was also prevalent. These children struggle with language and vocabulary development. The good news is that parents can solve the word gap by talking, reading and singing more to their children every day.”

But parents sometimes struggle with illiteracy, too. That’s where the Attollo device comes in.

Easily scalable due to its low cost, the device uses stickers to prompt playback of pre-recorded educational audio, helping to overcome parents’ own challenges with literacy. Parents can record new vocabulary, short sentences or pages from a book in their own voice. They can use the device to complete interactive activities with their child. Or, when a parent is busy working, it can be left in the hands of children to scan stickers and learn from the playback.

As part of the Hult competition, the team has been testing Talking Stickers this summer at schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Hyderabad, India and Mombasa, Kenya. They’ve worked with such NGOs as the Aga Khan Foundation and Pratham, the largest early childhood development NGO in India.

Thanks to those trial runs, Pratham, Aga Khan and Right to Play have signed letters of intent, expressing interest in obtaining several hundred devices and stickers. UNICEF has also expressed interest.

(photo above by Eugene Grichko – Rotman School of Management)

U of T Faculty of Information Associate Professor Matt Ratto helped with product development. And along the way, staff and faculty from U of T’s Rotman School of Management and across U of T rallied to help Team Attollo, with everything from feedback on pitches and presentations to financial support.

“Students and faculty at U of T know that the challenges we confront as a global community are more intertwined, complex, and social than ever before,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation. “Team Attollo represents the kind of critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork and ethical and social reasoning that the university encourages and supports in its social entrepreneurs.”

(To learn more about entrepreneurship at U of T visit U of T's Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship)

Thanks to Rotman School of Management Professor Dilip Soman, the group got a face-to-face meeting with government officials in the state of Telengana. Those officials also want to partner with the group to purchase the devices and stickers for government-run early childhood development initiatives.

“My role was simply to talk about the team's product and potential to the Canadian Trade Office in Delhi and to request their help,” Soman said. “The Canadian Trade Commissioner in New Delhi, Ivy Lerner Frank, has been a great supporter of our work at the India Innovation Institute, and she saw this as a classic example of the kind of innovative social enterprise ideas that need to be supported. Ivy and her office facilitated meetings between the team, and the Telangana government, resulting in the memorandum.”

Team members also participated in an incubator at the Hult International Business School in Boston, receiving mentoring and strategic planning advice.

For this next week, the group is focused on last-minute preparations ahead of the finals on Sept. 26.

After that, they’re working with Autodesk Research, who crafted the device, and U of T Electrical Engineering Professor David Johns, who is helping the group make the device more compact and affordable. They’re also considering secondary markets for Talking Stickers such as collaborations with consumer packaged goods and medical/pharmaceutical companies to help people around the world who can’t read to comprehend instructions on drugs and other goods.

Attollo members say they're excited to work with U of T's Dr. Stanley Zlotkin and the Centre for Global Child Health at SickKids Hospital in Toronto to use the Talking Stickers concept to help families understand how to use Sprinkles – a UNICEF child nutrition product. Stickers can be placed on Sprinkles sachets to provide audio instructions on proper product usage when scanned – in any dialect or language around the world.

It’s the work with Pratham that has them the most excited. They see the potential of putting reading devices into the hands of children who can’t afford to go to school.

“The way we’re going to distribute this into our target area is by finding a like-minded partner who shares our mission of impacting underprivileged children in communities we need to serve,” Cinat said. “We think we’ve found such a partner in Pratham. Their mission is to teach and support children who have been left behind. Pratham serves 1 million children under the age of 6 today in India, operating in 21 out of 29 states.”

“Still, there’s over 20 million people not served with any form of early childhood development. That’s the market that together with Pratham we are going to target.”

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Literacy secrets: understanding how children learn to read

sgupta — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 10:19:43 +0000

Literacy secrets: understanding how children learn to read sgupta Wed, 11/27/2013 - 05:19

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Trelani Milburn conducts a shared-reading exercise with Elmirah Ewan–Ibrahim (photo by Erin Howe)

Jim Oldfield

Author legacy

Jim Oldfield

Topic

What are the best ways to promote literacy in children? As an early literacy specialist who taught parents and preschool teachers, Trelani Milburn answered that question many times.

During nine years of community work in Southern Ontario, Milburn used techniques such as face-to-face interaction with infants and linking stories to events in children’s lives when reading to them. But she sometimes had trouble answering another question: “What evidence supports the advice I’m giving?”

This second question inspired Milburn to go back to school in 2007, more than 20 years after she first became a student at the ��Ƶ Scarborough. She finished an undergraduate program part-time then upgraded it to an honours degree in psycholinguistics. Milburn started graduate school the day her youngest child began his undergraduate program.

Milburn is now a third-year PhD student in the Child Language Lab run by Luigi Girolametto, a professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology. She studies emergent literacy — the foundational skills that enable children to begin to read and write — such as vocabulary, storytelling, and letter and sound recognition.

She no longer wonders what evidence informs child literacy — she creates it.

“There is a delicate interplay between children and adults. If we can better measure what works, we can improve the literacy of all children, and intervene more effectively to help those at risk of falling behind,” says Milburn.

“Shared reading” is one way adults can build literacy in all kids, while limiting risk for those who face major learning challenges. Parents and teachers can learn to engage children in conversation with open questions and responsive statements, rather than reading books cover-to-cover. This interaction can enhance a child’s understanding of and ability to use language.

But there is not a lot of evidence that shows exactly why, or how well, shared reading works.

Milburn and her colleagues recently developed a system to measure shared reading, and to show whether it increases conversation between kids and adults. They divided educators into two groups, and trained one group in shared-reading techniques. Then they video-recorded the educators reading to their kids, and tracked the number of open questions, variety of words and “turns” in each conversation.

“I can say emphatically that professional development changed the educators’ interactions with children,” says Milburn, the lead author on the study, which will appear in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. “We saw a statistically significant difference between the groups in a naturalistic context, and because of the strength of the study design — this was a randomized, controlled study — we’re confident the results will translate to other classrooms.”

Girolametto has helped move several findings from the Child Language Lab into the classroom, through long-standing relationships with community organizations. For eight years, he worked at the Hanen Centre, which educates thousands of parents, educators and speech language pathologists around the world.

“It often takes a decade or more for research to change real-world practices,” says Girolametto. “But the Hanen Centre can disseminate new knowledge as we create it and improve literacy practices right away.”

Girolametto says Milburn is also well-positioned to make an impact on the lives of children, given the professional relationships she built before returning to school. And, she is still asking questions.

“Trelani has a very curious mind,” he says. “It’s what led her back to school, and keeps her asking fresh questions of the data, which is great for our lab.”

Jim Oldfield is a writer with the Faculty of Medicine at the ��Ƶ.

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