Book Village

Our Mission: To end the reading crisis in South Africa by connecting children, volunteer tutors and reading books through a reading app so that every child might have individual reading tuition.

Purpose:  To help children learn to read for meaning and enjoyment.

Objectives:

(i) to provide low-income schools with the digital infrastructure of tablets, headphones and data to use our online tutoring application

(ii) to recruit, screen, train and manage tutors who listen and coach the children to improve their reading skills

(ii) provide a digital library for the children to enjoy reading 

Core Values: Impactful education, innovative, focused on the individual child, inclusive, community driven, collaborative, adaptable, ethical, kind, working together, digitally human, data driven.  

Lauren is our co-founder and the COO of Book Village that she runs with Sarah Bradfield, Book Village's CEO. Together they co-created the Book Village reading app with their development team and partner BASALT Technologies. This app development continues to evolve as they learn from their practice of tutoring reading remotely using their reading app.

In addition to this, Lauren manages the day-to-day scaling and operations of Book Village, sharing many of these tasks with Sarah (the CEO). These tasks include marketing, social media management, finding funding, working on-site with facilitators, tutors and children using the Book Village reading app, managing and training volunteers, and planning information socials and events. 

Lauren also remains committed to growing her own skills to support Book Village and to this end is involved in various activities and assignments on programs such as Injini Edtech Accelerator Programme, Future Females Business school, Social Shifters Digital Incubator, Global Edtech Startup Awards.

We have a facilitator in the schools to run the day-to-day operations and  have engaged a part time administrative assistant and a social media intern who help with administrative tasks and social media.

 We have 270 volunteers with many and varied skills.  Two of our volunteers have taken on new volunteer training which is a big help.

This structure leaves Lauren and Sarah with enough time to devote to the opportunity of working with the Leap project.

A one-on-one learning experience where each child receives individual support with their reading from an online volunteer tutor

We have noticed that there is a distressing lack of human connection in the learning to read process in low-income schools throughout South Africa. Classrooms are overcrowded, under-resourced and teachers overextended. There is a shortage of people (teachers, parents, community members) to help facilitate the reading process of young learners, to listen to the children's reading, help them with their pronunciation and ensure they eventually learn to read for meaning.

Our results based on our work at Cosmo City Primary School to the North of Johannesburg, over the past two years, have confirmed that over 80% of children are not reading at all, or not at their expected level by the end of Grade 1 and Grade 2.  60% of children in South Africa leave grade 1 without knowing the letters of the alphabet. Most children in grade 2 and 3 (over 80%) do not have the necessary pre-reading skills to begin reading books. To add to this there is a lack of digital infrastructure for the children at most of the schools. We sense that Cosmo City Primary is most likely a microcosm of all such schools in South Africa. 

Most, if not all, the Children are learning in a second language. They are addressed in the teacher's vernacular, which may not be their mother tongue, and all formal learning is in English. Children lack English vocabulary and comprehension. Book Village helps address this lack of English skills by providing one-one repetitive practice of reading with an online tutor. 

An additional observation has been that of teaching styles in these schools. These are at best encouraging rote learning and little to no creative problem-solving or critical thinking is required.  

Book Village addresses key facets underpinning the reading crisis under one easy to use, comprehensive app - Book Village - being digitally human. The app is a smart digital creation that connects the two key role players of Student and Tutor to engage in live interactive practice of reading skills and the joy of reading.

Three key app components make this happen. (i) The admin console that facilitates the attraction, selection and set up of the tutors and holds a vast digital library of reading level appropriate online books (SORA OverDrive) and world class readers (Oxford AWEH reading system). These books and readers form the foundation of the Tutor – Student sessions and guide the progressive reading practice at the student’s pace. (ii) the Tutor where the Tutor is matched to a student online to enable live interactive reading practice, filled with encouragement and support (iii) The Student who is able to practice their reading at their appropriate level guided by a live online tutor.

In so doing Book Village leverages technology to improve the literacy deficit among children growing up in South Africa. To achieve our broader goal, we are scaling our partnerships with under resourced schools in low-income areas and providing the technological infrastructure that will enable children to access the Book Village app and the digital library (SORA by OverDrive). 

The Book Village App uses a levelled reading series, using the AWEH! readers by Oxford University Press as the perfect fit as they are relatable to the South African learners and correlate with the SA CAPS curriculum. Children will be able to borrow books from the digital library and receive individualised reading tutoring from one of our carefully vetted volunteers through the Book Village App. 

Our goal is to implement the Book Village app in 80 schools within the next 5 years, thus affecting around 100 000 primary school learners. With the help of funders and the positive results received from the app, we anticipate exponential growth and hope to affect 1 million students throughout Africa in the next 10 years.

Whereas we have not specifically being focusing on Learning Variability highlighted as one of the MIT Solve's interest, we feel we may score fairly highly for "within-group variability" as Children receive individual in-person instruction. Each child is assessed initially and again from time to time to ensure that they are reading at the correct level.  Children who fail the first level of assessment begin the pre-reading programme. They will do this until they have acquired the necessary skills.

For "within-person variability" we think that the fact that there are a large number of tutors and each one brings their own teaching style and take on the subject matter (books etc.) means that children have a chance to find a tutor that they really connect with.

For Context variability we think that the different interests and styles of the tutors are extremely beneficial here.

To date aside from using various public research studies such as PIRLS, we have only conducted reading assessments of the Grade 2s and Grade 3s during January and February 2023.  Here we assessed the children through the Book Village app, using the app's Reading Practice function.

Method

The Reading Practice function takes the children, with their tutors, through the San Diego Quick Reading Assessment. It starts with the simplest level (Level 1) and students either progress to the next level if they read all the words correctly, or the test is completed if they are unable to read two or more words at that level.  The words in each level are presented in a random order to prevent children from memorising the words.  There are 6 levels on our app.

From the results of these reading assessments, children are automatically allocated the correct level of reading book the next time they log in.

Results

With the help of our volunteer team, we assessed 440 children in Grades 2 and 3.  We decided not to test the Grade 1 children in the first term, as we felt that most of them would not be able to read anything yet.  We will test the Grade 1s later in the year.

The results of our reading assessments show that very few children are reading at the expected level for their grade.  In Grade 2, 30 children out of the 246 tested are reading at their expected level (12.2%). and in Grade 3, 17 children out of the 194 tested are reading at their expected level (8.8%).

General comments

From these assessments it is clear that most of the children do not have the necessary skills to begin with even the most simple book.  Our developers are working on a pre-reading programme that will be added to the app during the year. Children who didn’t pass the first reading assessment level will start with the pre-reading programme once it is ready. 

Once we started with the book reading sessions we found that some children who had passed the first level, were unable to read the Level 1 book allocated to them.  We have taken these children off the Book Village reading session rotation until the pre-reading programme is ready. 

We have also found from the tutors that some children were obviously reading on the wrong level of books.  We are busy working on a feature where the facilitator will be able to move a child down a reading level, or request a new assessment for that child.

Our results in numerical terms are really not good, and not unusual in South Africa.  According to a recently released report “2023 Reading Panel background report” written by Nic Spaull of Stellenbosch University, South Africa is going backwards in terms of literacy.  The report states that about 60% of children leave grade 1 without learning the letters of the alphabet, and by the end of grade 2 more than 30% of children still don’t know their letters.  82% of children cannot read for meaning by the end of grade 4.

We know it was hard work for the tutors and at times very discouraging – but these assessments are essential to provide baseline data to help make decisions and to hopefully show improvement in the childrens’reading abilities. Despite the barriers experienced by the tutors (the children are very young, most of the children can’t read at all, and none of the children have English as their home language), they did a really great job of getting the children to try their best.  We found that the assessment we used was fairly accurate, but doesn’t give a full picture of the childrens’ abilities.  The next version of the app will have a more thorough assessment and will include letter sound knowledge and a comprehension test.

We are taking Book Village to a greater scale, the app is working well, our tutor pool is increasing and we are generating quite a lot of data. Data about reading from SA schools is quite hard to come by as the Teaching and Educational unions do not allow any standardised annual assessments. Apart from the improvement in reading, comprehension, vocabulary and social skills that are evident from watching the recordings and from the assessment data, we also think we will be able to determine the elements that make up a good reading lesson.  i.e. what makes a successful tutor?  (Oxford were very interested in this when we showed them a video).

We also think there is scope to analyse what keeps and motivates the tutors to volunteer as they are central to the reading apps' success.

Our need to strengthen the evidence base is we see it as the only way we can show the efficacy and benefits of the programme.  We are collecting and storing a lot of data but we don't have a way of analysing all of it. e.g. how do we measure improved vocabulary, critical thinking and social skills of the kids from the recordings?  It is obvious when you watch the recordings, but we don't have a method of analysing the data. 

We want to show statistically significant results from the app so that we can attract funding and so make more impact.  It will naturally help to bring the spotlight on the dismal reading abilities of South Africa's children.

1. How effective (as in statistically significant) is our reading app solution in improving the reading abilities of children?  

2. How can we analyse the rich data held in our online tutor-learner qualitative recordings sessions to show improvements in each child's reading, comprehension communication, vocabulary and general knowledge including improvements in the children making predictions and inferences?

3. How can we use the same recordings of sessions to determine the factors that make someone an effective volunteer tutor?

4. What prompts someone to volunteer for our reading app online tutor and what makes them keep on or stop on volunteering?

A statistical analysis of the reading assessment results and recordings of the reading sessions from Jan to June showing the progress of the children. This ideally will include the proficiency of the children with respect to reading, improvements in confidence, comprehension and verbal skills.

An analysis of the online reading tutor sessions recordings that identifies the factors that lead to a tutor's success. This will allow Book Village to train tutors and teachers effectively.

Book Village will use these outputs to ratify or not the efficacy and impact of the reading app solution so that we can attract funding, partners and so scale.

Aside from quantifying the obvious benefits in comprehension and it communication, we would like to compare a child in January vs December with a qualitative score so that we can measure how they improve over time.

From a tutor perspective we would like to use the analysis of the recordings and correlate with each child's reading assessment to know the efficacy of a particular tutor, and what makes them successful.

To reach 1400 in 2 schools with an improvement in reading levels for those children reading books (about 200/1400). 

For those children who don’t have the necessary pre-reading skills (the rest 1200/1400) to acquire them (e.g. letter phonics knowledge, reading from left to right, blending of sounds, listening to a story and putting it in sequence)

Currently we have 270 volunteers which we would like to reach 500 by end of 2023

And increase our facilitators by one and our community reading tutors to a total of four from two.