Literacy for a Billion in India!

Dear Friends, 

I am happy to share that we have made good progress in the eye-tracking study I mentioned last year. 

Firstly, here is a project recap: The main goal of our project is to study the impact of Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on reading engagement and reading skills in girls & women via eye-tracking. 

Project Goals:

1. Target audience: 300 women and girls (> 50% to be girls) with the majority as weak readers.
2. Conduct a baseline eye-tracking study of all participants.
3. Divide the participants into 2 groups: one group will view content with SLS (treatment group) and the other will view content without SLS (control group).
4. Show all participants 30 mins of content 3 times per week for 3 months.
5. Conduct an endline eye-tracking study of all participants.
6. Analyze findings and report.

The 3 major areas in which we made progress in the last 7 months are:

1. Add SLS to content that the girls and women like to watch
2. Create Reading Assessment Tool for girls and women
3. Conducted the baseline reading and eye tracking for 195 girls across 4 locations in Pondicherry

After creating content with SLS, our primary focus was on designing the “Tamil Fluency Battery Test” which has 5 questions. Starting from very simple letter recognition this test helps us assess comprehension too.

We had a couple of meetings with our local NGO partner, Sharana in Pondicherry. Then we organized training sessions for social workers at Sharana:

We first trained the social workers at Sharana. There were 7 social workers from Sharana. Mr.Prakash, Mr.Anbazhagan, Mr.Ravianand, Mrs.Vadivu, Mr.Suriya, Mr.Kiruba, and Mrs.Soundari who were going to help us with the project. From our side, Ms. Fanovard is leading the project. She is working closely with other team members Mr. Rosario, Ms. Mariadassou, Mr. Munnuswamy, and Mr. Krishnan.

We had a session organized for the social workers at Sharana to let them know the goals of the project and how we want the reading test and eye tracking to be conducted. We had a mock test conducted for the social workers at Sharana for them to have a better understanding and hands-on experience on the subject matter.

We had mock sessions among the social workers and even a trial run with students who are not included in the study.

Baseline:

Baseline tests were conducted in 4 different locations for girls as mentioned earlier in the following order:

• Sharana social and development organization center
• Sacred Heart Of Jesus Govt. Aided High School
• St. Francis Assisi Convent High School
• Angalakuppam community center

Next Steps:

Having completed both reading tests and the eye tracking study for the girls, we are now going to collect the data and get the 2 groups of girls ready for the sessions. Our aim is to start the viewing sessions of SLS content by mid-October.
We will get the baseline study for women done by end of October. We will keep you posted as we make more progress.