Growth and application of literacy skills by rural Zambian mothers with assistance from their children

Abstract

The main objective of this case study was to use children as models to assist their parents in acquiring literacy with the help of a phone-based literacy game. Eight women in rural Zambia were loaned phones with GraphoGame^TM, a digital literacy game, to use as a resource for literacy learning, with the assistance of their children. The participants were given literacy tests before the intervention and after their exposure to GraphoGame to determine the impact of the intervention. Analyses using t-tests and a Mann-Whitney U test found that the parents’ performance on the literacy tests improved significantly after the intervention period, compared with their pre-intervention performance. Furthermore, key informants indicated that the parents who participated in the study improved their literacy skills in various social and community interactions, as compared with parents within the same community who were not exposed to the game. Thus, the study showed that it is possible to use literacy technology to teach literacy to illiterate rural adults with the help of their children. The study concluded that literacy can play an important role in increasing community participation and consequently community improvement for rural women.