A Report on Literacy/A Report on Illiteracy

Born out of my conviction that you often have to know the severity of the problem before you can start to address the problem, I spent a large chunk of time putting each kid who lives in the children's home through a simple literacy test. My intent was to discover how fluently they read - you'll see that I paid absolutely no attention to comprehension, and you'll hopefully see why I made that decision initially. I also should disclaim that I'm trying to create an approach that can be reproduced by an African teacher with very few resources and many students in his or her class.

Be forewarned: this post reveals the full extent of my dorkiness, particularly when it comes to data. Proceed at your own caution. If you came here for my glib assessment of life in rural Africa and the accompanying anecdotes, I'll be back with more of that soon.

First a word about methodology, and I'm offering this mainly because I'd love to hear from others about how this methodology can be improved, where it is lacking, what it overlooks, etc. Here's how I tested the kids:

·         Before we came to Sudan I stopped by Bookies, Denver's finest educator bookstore, and picked up five editions of the DK Reader series, each of which was rated at a different reading level - all the way from a child who is still learning to read up to a fully independent reader. The total cost for all five books was $15, making it replicable for others trying to reproduce this system.

·         When I met with each child, I had them start with the lowest book and read the title. If they were able to, I moved on to the next level and had them do the same, until I came to the highest level book of which they could read the title. For a few of them, you'll see on the chart below, I had them read a couple different books in order to get a fuller picture of their abilities. This was the most subjective part of the process; for many children I could tell from listening to them read for two minutes what they were capable of and where they struggled, and for some I needed to see them attack more difficult material to see what they would do.

·         I then had the child read to me from that book for two minutes. During that time I kept track of how many mistakes they made in reading, and at the end I tabulated how many words they had read total, and divided by two to find their average words per minute. Both words per minute and mistakes are recorded on the table.

·         In general, I was looking for the level where the child was pronouncing 80% of the words correctly.

·         While the child read I was primarily listening for the following things: phonetic awareness, familiarity with simple & complex vowel sounds, ability to divide longer and more unfamiliar words into chunks, ability to read with expression.

The full results are below, but I want to draw your attention to a few things:

·         Age doesn't necessarily correlate with their progress in school. Because of the instability in this region, many of the kids have been in and out of school for a long time, and this has seriously impacted their progress.

·         To read the notations for their year in school, know that the system is divided into three schools: nursery school (which has 3 years), primary school (which has 7 years), and secondary school (which has 6 years). A student marked p7 is in their 7th year of primary school, "s" is for senior, and "n" is for nursery.

·         You'll notice a handful of kids who seem to be reading at a remarkable rate but with a similarly remarkable number of mistakes. Those children, without fail, are not actually reading - they just have incredible memories and have memorized a ton of sight words and are using that knowledge bank to guess at everything else.

·         You'll notice an even greater number of kids - 23 to be exact -   who have only a 0 in the first column. Those children, unfortunately, are completely illiterate. Some are in nursery school, so it's not too shocking, but many are in the middle and upper levels of primary school. Most of them can recognize all the letters in the alphabet, but they have no ability to put those letters together to form words or even identify the sounds each letter should make. These are the children I'm most concerned about.

Alright, have a look at the data. If you have thoughts, share them in the comment section.

Update: So, Blogger isn't super kind to this table - you can highlight it within the browser to see all the data.  You can also copy it and paste it into something that makes it easier to look at.  I'd do it for you, but be thankful that I get internet at all here - let's not ask too much.

Age	School Year	Pre-1 WPM	Pre-1 Mistakes	Level 1 WPM	Level 1 mistakes	Level 2 WPM	Level 2 mistakes	Level 3 WPM	Level 3 mistakes	Level 4 WPM	Level 4 mistakes
20	s4									107	5
20	s4									82	6
16	s2					70	15	81	22
19	s2			48	13	48	19
18	s1			39	22	34	17
17	s1					96	26
17	s1							79	14	80	8
17	s1			39	7
17	s1					49	9
19	s1					40	9
19	s1					32	11
18	s1					58	14
17	p7			48	9	37	7
16	p7			94	15	61	16
17	p7					64	7	58	14
16	p6					58	8
15	p6			44	16
15	p6					60	13
17	p6			36	12
13	p6			20	13
15	p6			60	18	36	21
15	p6	0
14	p5	35	10	28	23	26	18
14	p5			43	41
14	p5	26	8	20	25
14	p5	0
14	p5	0
15	p5			37	41
15	p5	0
16	p5	32	8	26	18
15	p4	0
15	p4	0
14	p4			18	13
11	p4	23	8	23	16
13	p4	0
15	p4	0
11	p3	0
13	p3	0
13	p2	0
13	P2	19	6	18	9
11	p2	0
10	p2			21	7
8	p2	15	13
8	p2	0
14	p2	13	9
11	p2	0
11	p2	0
7	p1	0
15	p1
10	p1
8	n3	0
6	n3	0
5	n2	0
6	n2	0
4	n1	0
15	p4?	0