Randomized education interventions

I'm reading an interesting paper by Michael Anderson, who revisits the data from some of the early studies of the impact of pre-K interventions (i.e. preschool: daycare in educational-type settings) on very disadvantaged childen (i.e. where significant number would drop out of high school and have criminal records).

There has apparently been a lot of concern that the three influential studies of the 1960s and 1970s were very much compromised by small sample sizes and what the experimenters call "contamination", when the experimental protocol is not followed exactly. This is what we had, apparently, in FAVL's study of the effects of the summer reading camps of 2008, where some smallish number of the assignments were changed from the random assignment, because if someone who was assigned was not in the village, they were replaced not with a random pick but with someone the team knew would be around in the village. So there was some bias, and this was picked up in some of the pre-program test scores, which were higher for the campers than for those invited to the discussion groups and those who got free books to read.

After re-analysis, Anderson concludes:

The results demonstrate that preschool intervention has significant effects on later life outcomes for females, including academic achievement, economic outcomes, criminal behavior, drug use, and marriage. The effect on total years of education is particularly strong. However, while treatment effects are sizable for females, they are minimal or nonexistent for males - a fact relevant to the design of optimal human capital policy.

So a strong gender effect, which is very interesting and important, though not explained..

But the most interesting par tfor me is the method to control for contamination.

A thorough analysis of threats to validity, conducted in Appendix A, concludes that the main results are unaffected by reasonable assumptions regarding attrition, violation of random assignment, and clustering.

What Anderson does is assign values to the outcomes (in our case the test scores) for those missing. Typically he assigns outcomes in ways that are favorable to the null: the treatment group is assigned the 25th percentile score, which the control group missing are assigned the 75th percentile. Then he computes the new differences in means and statistical significance. And why not? So tomorrow I hope to run this and see how it affects results. We have more missing than he does, but larger sample sizes.

Somewhat stochastically dominating summer camps

Blattman refers readers to a nice summary paper by Angus Deaton on using statistics in development to understand what kinds of aid assistance works. One sentence on randomized controlled trials (RCT) caught my attention:

Essentially, the RCT gives us two marginal distributions, from which we would like to infer a joint distribution; this is impossible, but the marginal distributions limit the joint distribution in a way that can be useful, for example if the distribution among the treated stochastically dominates the distribution
among the controls.

Interestingly, the distribution of the reading test results for students who were in the two week library summer camps do indeed dominate the control groups (that is, the distribution of grades is shifted to the right). The control groups either got two free books or were given small monetary incentives to participate in weekly book discussions. The mean score goes from 66 to 74 (p<.01), about a 10% increase. The cost of the camp was on the order of $20 per child. So not a huge effect for the cost, but seems reasonable enough.

If this is so obvious, how come libraries are so rare in development funding?

The impact of popular literature study on literacy development in EFL: more evidence for the power of reading
Christy Ying Laoa and S. Krashen
System Volume 28, Issue 2, June 2000, Pages 261-270

University level EFL students in Hong Kong who participated in a popular literature class that emphasized reading for content and enjoyment, including some self-selected reading, made superior gains on measures of vocabulary and reading rate, when compared to students enrolled in a traditional academic skills class. Eighty-eight percent of the literature students felt that what they learned from the course would help them in other university courses, but only 12% of the traditional academic skills students had this opinion about their class. These results are consistent with previous studies showing that meaningful reading is an important source of literacy competence.

Interesting study of reading

"Comparing the Effects of Reading and Writing on Writing Performance" WAI-KING TSANG Applied Linguistics. 1996; 17: 210-233

The study compares the effects of an enriched syllabus which included extensive reading and frequent writing assignments on English descriptive writing performance at different form levels It examines a group of Cantonese-speaking students at four form levels in Hong Kong who participated in three English programs (A) regular plus unrelated (mathematics) enrichment program, (B) regular plus extensive reading, and (C) regular plus frequent writing practice Results demonstrated significant main effects due to the nature of program and form level with no significant interaction of these factors The regular plus extensive reading program was overall significantly effective, while both the regular plus mathematics program and the regular plus frequent writing practice were not In the area of content, the reading program was the only one which showed a significant positive effect Similarly, in the area of language use, the reading program was the only one of the three shown significantly effective

Never heard of this, have you?

The title is "Hooked On Books: Program & Proof" by Daniel N. Fader & Elton B. McNeil. Maybe I never heard of it for a reason... otherwise would it have been turned into a purse by someone at etsy.com? Oh I forgot: ;-)

Reading the sign for the hump in Uganda

From a nice study done by two Swedish students Anna Jönsson and Josefin Olsson entitled, "Reading culture and literacy in Uganda: The case of the 'Children’s Reading Tent'", available here is the PDF file.

Apart from perceiving reading and writing as vital to passing tests a majority also gave other reasons to why it is important to read. The children said that reading is important because you can “learn things”, “understand new things” and “get new skills” through reading. Reading also “helps you learn how to behave” and is a way to “communicate”. Moreover, some children said that it is important to read because otherwise you are not able to understand information given in written text. Those children stated that if you can not read you can miss out on information (and secrets) given through letters, signs and sheets. In addition, one child explained why reading is something to take seriously, since your life can depend on it.

A driver who didn’t know how to what? Read. Now like what? Like a sign. There is a hump ahead. That means you have to decrease what? The speed. This man just rushed, when he doesn’t know that it is ahead there, what? A hump. He ended up making an accident. Because he didn’t know how to read. He saw a doctor, there was nothing he could do. It was the ending of his life (Boy 13 years old, Mityana, 2007-02-27).

Some children also express the view that writing can be part of their everyday lives outside school. This view came through when some children stated that they wrote letters to pen-pals, poems and in their diaries at home. One girl stated that she wrote about the war in the North which she had experienced first hand and said that it made her sad to write about the war but that she felt better afterward (Girl 11 years old, Mityana, 2007-02-26).

I'd love for someone to do this in Koumbia...

IRA Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2008
Kindergarten as Nexus of Practice: A Mediated Discourse Analysis of Reading, Writing, Play, and Design in an Early Literacy Apprenticeship
Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University,

How does “playing school,” an ordinary childhood pastime, shape children's reading abilities, classroom identities, and relative social positioning? This ethnographic study of kindergarten literacy play situates children's combinations of play, reading, writing, and design within a nexus of practice (Scollon, 2001), the web of seemingly natural combinations of ways of interacting shared by an embodied community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). When literacy and play practices combine, they support and strengthen one another, proliferating ways for children to “do school” and increasing access for diverse learners. For example, playing school produces a reading/playing nexus where (a) reading supports play goals—reading to play—as children read books and charts to make play scenarios more credible or to gain the cooperation of other players and (b) playing supports reading development—playing to read—as pretending to be the teacher and teaching pretend students enables children to share and explore reading strategies.

Reading is hearing?

A fascinating summary from the Am. Psychological Association of some recent reading research in terms of the brain...

Reading research has made significant progress over the past 30 years, accelerating in the last few years as researchers who do intervention collaborate with brain-imaging researchers. Many studies over the last three decades have confirmed that reading has more to do with mentally “hearing” letter sounds and words than with seeing them, thus making it clear that children with reading problems are not lazy or unintelligent. Instead, they have specific brain-based differences in how they process information.

By using brain images to study reading, psychologists and their colleagues in medicine and education have found a biological explanation for the 2004 finding that research-based teaching can significantly improve how students with dyslexia read and spell. And in another 2004 study, they found evidence that effective instruction normalizes brain function.

The 2005 study showed that children who might otherwise have trouble learning to read can be identified and taught before their reading problems are apparent. When taught, their brains will change in as little as a year. This news is encouraging: Most kids who are at risk for reading problems can still learn to read.

More is available here. My own curiosity lies not in how the brains of readers experiencing difficulties reading are different from "normal" readers, but rather how the experience of sustained reading itself, a novel every month, might change the brain's ability to process information. Does it?

Bible reading as reading

Cribbed from the scholars (the link is gated so no point posting):

Book review of
The road to clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar – By Eva Keller Basingstoke: Palgrave 2005.
by
Michael Lambek London School of Economics and Political Science/University of Toronto
in
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 13(3) Pages 774-775 2007

The road to clarity is itself a model of clarity. With lucid writing and direct argument, Keller draws us to a small number of Seventh-Day Adventists in the remote town of Maroantsetra and surrounding villages of northeastern Madagascar. Established in the United States by 1860, Adventism has been only modestly successful in Madagascar (slightly under 1 per cent of the population in the district are members; this is higher than the national average and lower than neighbouring countries) but reasonably effective. In particular, the church's ability to manage the regular circulation of their quarterly Bible Study Guide with its daily lessons printed in Malagasy suggests a remarkable level of organization that is beyond the scope of Keller's study. It is the written publications that account for the success of Adventism in this part of Madagascar. They enjoin people to read and study the Bible, offering daily topics and questions with associated verses from the Old and New Testaments. Keller offers a compelling description of the intellectual pleasure gained from reading, studying, and conversing together. Interpretation is collective and democratic; Keller describes the method as Socratic and makes an interesting comparison with science. It is the process of study rather than any specific results which the Adventists enjoy, as well as the sense of potency that promises them the complete clarity of divine vision in the afterlife.

One could see this as a purely intellectualist account but insofar as one accepts Keller's observation that 'Bible study is not a means to an end, but an exciting and attractive activity in and of itself' (p. 242), so one must also acknowledge (at least from an Aristotelian perspective) the ethical dimension. Indeed, a chief strength of this book is Keller's strong rebuttal of the various utilitarian arguments so frequently made to explain conversion. Keller shows that Adventism is not practised in order to wriggle out of obligations to kin and take the short cut to middle-class life, and she shows the strong and selfless commitments that continue to be made to relatives across the denominational boundary.

Long-term effects of literary education on book-reading frequency

Long-term effects of literary education on book-reading frequency: An analysis of Dutch student cohorts 1975–1998
Marc Verboord
Department for the Study of the Arts and Culture, Erasmus University, The Netherlands

Poetics
Volume 33, Issues 5-6, October-December 2005, Pages 320-342

Abstract
We investigated the influence of literary education models on the book-reading frequency of students later in life, and how this influence can be explained. In total, 85 mother-tongue teachers in secondary education in the Netherlands were retrospectively questioned about their literary instruction in a random year between 1975 and 1998. Almost 700 former students of these teachers, spread over examination years and levels, were tracked down and interviewed about their current reading frequency. Multilevel analyses showed that the more student-centered the model of literary education is, the higher the later book-reading frequency. As the model gets more teacher-centered, the less students tend to read as adults. These effects do not vary over various student cohorts. Neither do changes in literary education over time explain differences in book-reading frequency between cohorts. Implications of these results are discussed.

An interesting study on the quintessential book flood... high hopes and then "oops"

Extensive reading in Malawi: inadequate implementation or inappropriate innovation?
Eddie Williams
Journal of Research in Reading
Volume 30 Issue 1 Page 59-79, February 2007
Abstract
This article reports on the evaluation of an extensive reading programme in primary schools in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa. The programme involved the delivery of book boxes at Years 4 and 5 to every Malawian primary school. Summative evaluation was achieved through baseline and project-end testing, with observations and interviews employed for illuminative purposes. A time-lapse design was employed, with testing in 1995 of Year 6 students (who had not had the programme in Years 4 and 5), and retesting in 1999 of Year 6 students in the same schools (who had had the programme in Years 4 and 5). Results unexpectedly showed a statistically significant decrease in mean score. The article explores deficiencies in programme implementation, but concludes that implementing educational innovations in Malawi requires sensitivity to the cultural-educational context. Furthermore, there is merit in Malawians radically questioning the appropriacy of innovations.

Gender differences in reading in the U.S.

From a paper "Children reading fiction books because they want to" by Jan C. van Ours, January, 2006, available here through SSRN, the following summary of a paper by Tepper intrigued me because the surveys I have been doing in Burkina Faso find no big gender differences in reading habits of secondary school students.

Tepper (2000) investigates why in the US women are more than twice as likely to be readers of fiction than men. He has two competing hypotheses. One hypothesis is that women read more fiction because cultural norms and patterns of socialization emphasize fiction reading as an appropriate activity for young girls. The other hypothesis is that women read more because they develop the cognitive skills necessary to read at an earlier age than boys do and remain more proficient readers throughout their lifetimes. In other words, the two competing hypotheses are that women read more fiction either because they are encouraged to read by parents and teachers, or because they are better readers. Tepper concludes that the data provide strong support for the socialization theory and virtually no support for the cognition arguments: many American parents view fiction reading as an appropriate activity for girls and as inappropriate for boys.

And here is a nice blog post from Purple Motes on the subject.

Working paper on books

I like the last line of the abstract, so I put it in italics... ;-)

The Economics of Books
Marcel Canoy , Frederick van der Ploeg , Jan C van Ours
February 2005

The tensions between books and book markets as expressions of culture and books as products in profit-making businesses are analysed and insights from the theory of industrial organisation are given. Governments intervene in the market for books through laws concerning prices of books, grants for authors and publishers, a lower value-added tax, public libraries and education in order to stimulate the diversity of books on offer, increase the density of retail outlets and to promote reading. An overview of the different ways by which countries differ in terms of market structures and government policies is given. Particular attention is paid to retail price maintenance. Due to differences between European countries it is not a good idea to harmonise European book policies. Our analysis suggests that the book market seems quite able to invent solutions to specific problems of the book trade and that, apart from promoting reading, there is little need for government intervention.

The reference to this came from a short piece by Thorvaldur Gylfason, called "When Iceland was Ghana"

When Home Rule was achieved in 1904, most of Iceland’s impoverished population was already literate because literacy had been near universal since the end of the 18th century. Thus, Icelanders were well prepared for the modern age into which they were catapulted at the beginning of the 20th century. Not only is the general level of education made possible by near-universal literacy good for growth, but the social conditions – law abidance, for example – that make near-universal literacy possible are almost surely also good for growth. Exact measures of literacy in Iceland in 1900 are unavailable, but statistical information on the number of books published is available. In 1906, the number of books in Icelandic published per one thousand inhabitants was 1.6, which is more than in today’s Norway and Sweden. By 1966, the number of books published in Icelandic per one thousand inhabitants had climbed to 2.7, the current level in Denmark and Finland. By 2000, the figure for Iceland had risen to seven books published per one thousand inhabitants. It is possible that, with small editions of each book, small countries such as Iceland (population 300,000) have room for more titles. Nonetheless, these are impressive figures, and reading is good for growth.

Amazing that literacy was 100% in 1900 in Iceland (of course, a tiny population back then) while in Burkina Faso today (14 million people) literacy is probably less than 35%. Does make you realize the enormity of the colonial decision to *not* promote education, but also then raises the question that if the first paper suggests the book trade can do just fine on its own (and by implication the market for literacy?) then why did self-literacy did not grow even faster in many African countries, both pre-colonial and post-colonial. Perhaps the colonizers did more (less?) than be passive but rather actively discouraged literacy the way the American slaveowners did? I've not seen any historical studies on this question, but confess I've not looked very hard.

Summer reading "experiment"

I've mentioned before that we've got modest funding to "treat" 4th and 5th graders (the equivalent) with some summer reading programs in the libraries in Burkina Faso. We're thinking of doing a simple randomized block design. The blocks are the five villages- can't do anything about that. Each village will then have 30 kids or so receiving reading encouragement and a couple free books and some activities in the summer, 30 kids would be invited to an intensive two-week summer reading camp run out of the library, and 30 kids would participate in a summer 8-week book discussion group, reading a book a week and discussing it. The idea is to see how big the effect is from the more costly and challenging programs (in terms of management). We'd give pre and post reading tests and some socio-economic background diagnostics. Anyone out there done something like this? Any suggestions?

Girl students become teachers... true in Africa?

An interesting finds from research in Pakistan (see below) is that private schools locate in areas where there are large number of girl secondary school graduates- who can be teachers for the private schools! I wonder whether anyone has done this kind of research in rural Africa? In Burkina Faso private schooling is primarily an urban phenomenon. But the rapidly growing town of Houndé near where FAVL libraries in Burkina are located now has a private school- started by the previous mayor. And certainly our librarians are often young women educated in secondary schools who then for one reason or another stay in their villages- perfectly according with the Pakistan finding.

Students Today, Teachers Tomorrow? The Rise of Affordable Private Schools
Tahir Andrabi, J. Das, and A. Khwaja, 2006
Private Schools are typically thought of as an “up-market” phenomenon. Pakistan 's experience during the last decade is the opposite, with a mushrooming of for-profit private schools and a 300 percent increase in private sector enrollments. This paper links the growth of private schools to the presence of schools in the public sector. We show that private schools are set up in villages where there are pre-existing girls' secondary schools. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that the presence of a private school increases the probability of a private school by 35 percentage points. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between private school existence and pre-existing girls' primary or boys' primary and high schools. Our results support a “women as teachers” channel: pre-existing high schools increase the supply of local skilled women and, in an environment with low female mobility, this lowers wages for women and lowers teaching costs for private schools in these localized labor markets. These findings highlight an important constraint to schooling–the supply of teachers–and suggest that one cannot ignore the role of higher education in achieving universal primary education.

Everyday Literacy in Africa

Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy And Making the Self, edited by Karin Barber, Indiana University Press, 2006.

Came across this interesting title. While mostly focused on the colonial era, the profiles of first-generation literates (who actively participated in the new "technology" of reading and writing in the colonial languages) remain very relevant today. There are plenty of patrons of FAVL-supported libraries who are the same sort of auto-didacts described in the various chapters.

Raises again a recurring theme on the blog: the impact of accessibility to reading materials may be enormous, but just for a handful of people. 100 users of a library may exhibit no discernible impact from the community libraries (except how many books they have read and their reading capability, but with no spillover into other aspects of life). But one person... deep literacy changes their life. How should we evaluate the worth of the library?

Home literacy environment

One of the most interesting things to observe in the coming decades in Burkina Faso is how a home literacy environment might emerge. Burkina Faso currently has very low levels of adult literacy (less than 25% in rural villages) and so most children in villages grow up with limited literacy environments in the home. But with African countries moving like jackrabbits chased by hunting dogs towards Universal Primary Education, in a generation the literacy (nominal literacy, let's be honest) of parents will start approaching 100%. Will these parents create rich literacy environments for their children? Or will they encourage them to play digital games on their soon-to-be ubiquitous cell phones?

The research on the importance of home literacy environment is very interesting- Young-Suk Kim a researchers at Florida State University & Florida Center for Reading Research who was at the CIES conference has an interesting paper on South Korean home literacy practices and their effects on subsequent literacy skills. She concludes:

The study revealed two dimensions of home literacy practices, home reading and parent teaching. Frequent reading at home was positively associated with children’s emergent literacy skills as well as conventional literacy skills in Korean. However, children whose parents reported more frequent teaching tended to have low scores in their phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading and pseudoword reading after accounting for home reading. These results suggest a bidirectional relationship between home literacy practices, parent teaching in particular, and children’s literacy skills such that parents adjust their teaching in response to their child’s literacy acquisition.

My reading of the literature is that this kind of finding is typical. How children learn to read is very complex, and it is difficult to disentangle all the casual factors because so much is happening in the interactions among learners, peers, educators, and parents. I've never seen a study like this done in African villages. One of the immediate problems, though, is that in villages like those of Burkina Faso children grow up learning a local language, and then in school transition to French, which they may have never spoken at home, and will not know many of the phonemes, and certainly none of the vocabulary. So what kind of home literacy environment is possible right now? Do we have to wait a generation?

One last quick reflection: the home literacy environment might indeed displace a home tam-tam environment.... one of Burkina Faso's foremost thinkers, Maitre Pacere Titinga, is the founder of a concept he calls bendrologie, the study of the sounds and meaning of the tam-tam the small hand drums used by the griots in Burkina Faso. Will children in rich home literacy environments not learn to hear the tam-tam? Or, something that wouldn't surprise me, would they turn out to be just like Maitre Pacere, masters of both!?

Summer reading in rural Africa

Thanks to some small grant support from Santa Clara University and Osu Children's Library Fund, this summer FAVL will run a few more pilot small-scale summer reading programs. Nowhere near the scale of the UK's national Summer Reading Challenge but enough to have some measurable effects at the village level. Osu Children's Library Fund will help fund a small reading camp in one of the libraries. We're thinking of running it for three weeks, five days a week. Participants (aged 10-13) will do a lot of reading (in groups, with partners, alone, aloud, silent) and a lot of playing (crafts, games, puzzles). The Santa Clara University research grant is to run some less intensive summer reading programs (once a week book discussion groups).

Maybe by the end too we'll have a little Youtube video advertising the programs... turns out there are dozens that have been posted to Youtube- librarians with a little too much time on their hands????

Learning to read in a classroom in Ouagadougou

The text that accompanies the video is as follows:

A second grade class at Naab Abga School in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, taught by Juliette Guere, was videotaped as part of a World Bank effort at developing teacher training materials on how to improve instructional time use and learning efficiency managed by the Human Development Network and Independent Evaluation Group, task manager Helen Abadzi. The teacher takes time to write brief texts on the blackboard. The students take turns reading this brief text at the board, write it on their slates and finally reorder the words using the slates. The brevity of the text limits reading practice in class and delays the acquisition of automaticity. As a result, the students may remain functionally illiterate for years.

Malaria is horrible for schooling even when kids not sick

A nice presentation by Matthew Jukes at the Comparative and International Education Society meeting this morning, about a randomized trial in Kenya where older kids who are relatively immune to the fever symptoms of malaria, but nevertheless are infected and full of the parasites, improved school performance significantly with a once-every-three-months anti-malarial pill. Seems that the parasites make you anemic, even if not feverish. Books are important for reading, but not having malaria is pretty darn important too. So what if kids had a book where they read about all the awful effects that malaria was having on them, and showing how to use a mosquito bednet? That would be a good book for FAVL volunteers to start working on.