Play, Connect and Learn: Using Mobile Phones to Improve Early Grade Reading Skills at Home

Ira Joshi

Mobile technologies offer great scope and potential for learning in countries with moderate income rates, low literacy levels, poor educational opportunities and high ownership of mobile phones. The paper discusses the efforts made by Sesame Workshop in India to support children’s grade l and 2 reading skills, specifically foundational literacy and reading comprehension, using mobile phones at home. It provides the findings from a quasi-experimental design research conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a mobile phone based reading application on the reading levels of children. A total of 627 children participated in the research, which used an adapted version of Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) to measure children’s early grade reading skills, in their mother tongue. The findings indicate statistically significant gains for children in the intervention group on four of the six subtasks: letter name identification, syllable identification, familiar word reading and oral reading fluency. These findings support the growing literature on the effectiveness of engaging and developmentally appropriate content delivered through mobile phones to improve children’s reading skills.

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