How our digital learning games train illiterates to acquire full literacy for learning via reading in Africa

Jacob Chomba Nshimbi
Centre for Advancement of Literacy and Skills in Schools (CALSS), Lusaka, Zambia
jcnshimbi@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1646-4144

Natalia Louleli
Department of Education and Humanities, Faculty of Education, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR), Logroño, Spain
Department of Language and Literature Teaching, Faculty of Education, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Leioa, Spain
natalia.louleli@unir.net
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1698-8765

Heikki Lyytinen
CEO of CGWorld Learning Ltd
Emeritus Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
Senior Adviser of Haskins Laboratories, Yale, USA
heikki.j.lyytinen@comprehensiongame.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2867-1749

Abstract

Achieving full literacy (FL), essential for efficient knowledge acquisition through reading, involves mastering basic reading skills and further developing reading comprehension skills. First, the learner has to acquire accurate and fluent text decoding, and then, as the second step, proceed towards FL. FL can be attained through extensive leisure reading, which enhances comprehension by following engaging narratives, or via targeted training that teaches effective reading strategies to manage working memory limitations. However, many children, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, lack access to engaging reading materials, hindering their natural progression to full literacy. This study, therefore, sought to explore the efficacy of using a computer-based literacy learning game to help grade 6 learners acquire first decoding and then comprehension of selected written subjects, which they had to learn at school. Their parents preferred following the children’s model and acquiring sufficient skills to use artificial intelligence chatbots. To document this, the study used a two-phase approach and started with a pilot study, which used an intervention design with a pre-/post-test. The main study used a randomized controlled trial in which grade 6 children were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. Participants for the pilot study, including children and adults, showed significant improvement in basic reading skills after using the GraphoLearn technology, validated extensively using its original name, GraphoGame. The new game, called Comprehensio Game, then effectively enhanced participants’ understanding of texts. Children’s learning from their schoolbooks was significantly elevated, and their parents’ knowledge of how climate change impacts can be avoided to guarantee their food security. The findings suggest that the game-based educational interventions significantly positively affected learners’ reading and comprehension performance. Thus, we can conclude that digital tools like the GraphoLearn-based GraphoGame and Comprehension Game can enhance literacy and comprehension skills, providing a viable solution for challenges associated with knowledge learning in rural areas of Africa. This is now even more important when knowledge has become available via Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots.

Keywords: reading, GraphoLearn technology, full literacy, Comprehension Game, AI-chatbots, rural Africa

Introduction

Acquiring knowledge efficiently by reading requires full literacy (FL), which PISA measures. Full literacy can be acquired in two ways, according to Lyytinen and Sigmundsson (2024). Learning basic reading skills (BRS) is obligatory as the starting point for both of these ways. BRS implies readiness to decode and sound out text accurately and fluently; however, this is not enough for Full Literacy (FL) nor sufficiently efficient learning from, e.g., schoolbooks. To acquire full literacy, one must take a second step. After learning BRS, FL can be achieved in two ways: First, by reading a lot of leisure material which are interesting enough to motivate the reader to follow the ‘red line’ to comprehend what is happening in the story. This reading for enjoyment outside school leads to full literacy relatively fast, according to King (2022) and the International Reading Association (2014). The other way to acquire FL is to get targeted training, which helps the reader acquire effective reading strategies. The most essential strategy means finding and attending to the most informative sentences, ie, the “red line” of the story or lesson. Using either of these two approaches, one learns to comprehend written language as well s/he can understand spoken language. The training is available via the last author’s new game, Comprehension Game (CG; see comprehensiongame.com; Lyytinen & Louleli, 2023). Lyytinen and Sigmundsson (ibid) explain that the explicit training using such a game helps in learning because working memory has a limited capacity. A learner can keep only 3-7 sentences in the working memory long enough to have these stored in permanent memory. One must acquire the skill to identify critical sentences containing the story’s or lesson’s essential points to keep them available in the working memory long enough for storing them for use during their later life.

Many children, especially boys, no longer read books during their leisure time, even if they have an opportunity to do so. Therefore, they struggle to reach full literacy.

Many children in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot access interesting materials they would be happy to read (Global Education Monitoring Report, 2016). Therefore, they need alternative ways to learn to read with comprehension. Here, we describe our two digital tools and show the effect of the Comprehension Game, which we now have ready to guide such children in reaching the goal of reading, FL.

In addition to the Comprehension Game helping children with basic reading skills, we now have a training game for young (3-7 year old) children to help them start taking the two steps towards FL, even before school, where learning from the schoolbooks requires FL. These young children are guided to focus from the start of their literacy career towards FL on the reading goal, comprehension of the meaning, instead of concentrating on sounding out the text only. This can be made by using our Tale Reader (TR) application. TR (for details, see comprehensiongame.com/en/tale-reader; Lyytinen & Louleli, 2023) guides young learners to follow exciting stories while the application reads them exciting stories by showing where the reader is moving in the text. It naturally keeps the listening child interested in following the red line as s/he follows the loud reading (sounding of words), and sees both spoken and written words together in close relation. Such a connection-building between spoken and written language helps learn basic reading skills, following logic applied in our GraphoLearn technology (for a review of it and its worldwide use, see Lyytinen, Semrud-Clikeman, Li, Pugh, & Richardson, 2021).

TR also supports learning basic reading skills via specific stories, which explicitly train the connections between spoken and written. This is made, for example, illustrating how an animal mother is instructing her children by first connecting the initial sound of names of animals child knows (shown on the right side of the phone’s display) and then asking the learner to draw a line to right side units containing written units from small (letters) via syllables to whole words. It starts by requesting the user to learn the connection between the first phoneme of the spoken name and the first letter of its written name.

As mentioned, children who have basic reading skills can be trained to FL via our Comprehension Game. This happens by helping them identify the essential contents (sentences or claims) from a text excerpt, or, as we recommend, from school lessons. Such an identification prevents overflowing readers’ working memory to help them store the content they have to learn, thus guiding them to comprehend the story/lesson and learning via reading. It can be used to instruct any lesson or knowledge content, but it requires someone (primarily a teacher) to write the key content of the lessons (or other content), which is the most natural context for using the CG. Showing – via such a modelling – how the text should be read for learning, can guide learners to follow it, if they first read the text, whose key sentences they then see in the Comprehension Game application. It is recommended to be introduced to pupils’ use during their school career when they have acquired an accurate and fluent sounding of texts (BRS). E.g., in Finland, this means that the use of the CG can be started during the second grade. The earlier children acquire full literacy, the earlier they can learn knowledge efficiently, and with less stress, they can understand the schoolbooks.

Boys tend to be more interested in playing digital games than reading. They can save learning time if their teachers or parents are motivated to implement the key contents of the lessons and allow them to use the Comprehension Game for learning FL.

We can say that the reading crisis now affects boys in many countries (for a description, see Lyytinen et al., submitted or comprehensiongame.com). This concerns the need to address the fact that the acquisition of full literacy is becoming compromised also in rich countries, while the acquisition of both basic reading skills and full literacy is in trouble in poor countries. Additionally, in poor countries, children usually do not have exciting reading materials to train themselves to FL using this natural way. Therefore, the present text shows how illiterate rural African people with no access to reading materials can be helped using digital training tools to acquire full literacy and have almost limitless access to written knowledge using free Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, to whose use we can guide them. We purport to show here that children in villages of illiterate people can be trained to FL and thus believe that we can also train people anywhere to acquire FL, and then learn knowledge via reading similarly.

The teams of the last author have documented earlier how the basic reading skills can be trained successfully using digital training tools which run in Android phones in Africa (e.g. Jere-Folotiya et al, 2014, for review of our all our related studies in Africa, see Ojanen et.al. 2015) where it has long been a problem, as shown by UNESCO’s statistics. These earlier studies were run in city areas. The second author has been involved earlier in studies run in rural areas (Nshimbi & Serpell, 2023). However, all these studies have trained only the basic reading skill, which is now noted as necessary but insufficient for learning in school, requiring full literacy.

The present study focuses on training full literacy using a combination of tools. First, training had to help participants learn the basic reading skills using GraphoGame (mentioned at the beginning). Then it continued with our new tool, Comprehension Game (CG), to show whether these can lead to sufficient reading skills for successful school learning. Today, this earlier training tool of basic reading skills is called GraphoLearn technology (GL), the technology on which the now commercialized GraphoGame is based. This technology was developed at the University of Jyväskylä and Niilo Mäki Institute, which played a game validated by the teams led by Heikki Lyytinen using the name GraphoGame (for review of the results, see Lyytinen et al., 2021). It was sold for commercial distribution to train millions of children worldwide. GL is the research version of the GG, which is now being replaced by Tale Reader (TR), designed by Heikki Lyytinen to train both learning steps, BRS and FL, to acquire knowledge efficiently via reading. TR can be started to use before school age.

Research has consistently shown that GraphoLearn (GL) can significantly fasten early learning of the basic reading skills by reinforcing grapheme-phoneme correspondences not only among typically learning children (Lyytinen, Erskine, Kujala, Ojanen, & Richardson, 2009) but also train at-risk struggling readers in Finland (Ronimus, Eklund, Pesu & Lyytinen, 2020) and also in the UK by experts without participation of Lyytinen (Ahmed et al., 2020). Meanwhile, comprehension-focused digital games, like the CG, are emerging as promising tools for promoting readiness to reach the goal of reading – mediation of meaning from the text, although empirical evidence remains limited. While GL/GG emphasizes decoding skills, CG introduces not only comprehension of text but also supports content-based learning, independent of what content is implemented in the game for learning. Despite the brief duration and topic-specific nature of CG training, its potential to enhance general academic performance warrants further investigation, particularly as a continuation of the decoding-focused tools.

Basic reading skills (BRS) can be instructed easily in languages whose orthographies are transparent at the grapheme-phoneme level by training children to associate phonemes with their corresponding letters. Next, learners must apply what they learned by pronouncing the sounds in the order of letters. In such languages (such as those of African local languages) all pronounceable sequences of letters (or more than one letter graphemes) can be sounded or read without any need to know the meaning of the results (Ojanen, Kujala, Richardson & Lyytinen, 2013); Ojanen et al., 2015; Lyytinen et al, 2021). This is why children are not conditioned to focus on the meaning of the text that they learn to sound out and have to be helped separately to reach the goal of reading (i.e., comprehending the meaning of the text) during the second step of their learning. If children have leisure books and are interested in reading them, they learn fast to comprehend text (which leads to FL) because this is the only way to enjoy reading. Starting to read as soon as the child has learned the BRS is a natural way to reach FL.

Learning requires one to be engaged in training long enough to experience sufficient repetitions that make it possible to develop the skill (Ronimus et al, 2019; 2020). This can be organized by using an application based on listening to exciting and engaging stories and, at the same time, seeing the words or sentences being read. This trains children to master BRS through continuous connection-building between spoken and written language. Listening to interesting stories makes children eager to follow the line of the story they read. As they listen to the words being read and at the same time follow with their eyes from one word to the next it provides them with an opportunity for “connection building”, which is comparable to what happens when GraphoLearn(GL) technology is used for training basic reading skills (Lyytinen & Louleli, 2023). These approaches represent a promising direction in early literacy interventions that merit further empirical investigation.

Here we concentrate on observing the learning of rural Zambian people to learn literacy using the GL and CG. Equipping children in primary school with effective reading skills is crucial as it forms the foundation for learning in all subjects, which Zambian children are guided to do according to the National Literacy Framework (MESVTEE, 2013). Full literacy plays a crucial role in enhancing learning in all subjects for primary school children. This is because literacy is a core set of skills that can help pupils overcome social and economic barriers and provide a basis for their success in everyday life. Full literacy also provides for effective communication between teachers and learners. Teachers can effectively communicate lesson concepts, learning objectives, and assessment requirements to learners. Full literacy builds a strong foundation for primary school children to develop lifelong learning skills (Demir, Aslan, and Demir, 2022; UNESCO, 2020). During school time, it makes learning stress-free after reading with comprehension has reached an automated level. The Comprehension Game can make it possible if applied in the context of learning lessons by always drawing the child’s attention to the most informative sentences of the lesson. Thus, the spontaneous habit of seeing all words/sentences as equal is soon forgotten, and the focus of attention is strategically identifying the key contents.

The described new digital learning games provide learners with a wide range of learning resources that can enhance their literacy skills to full literacy and broaden their opportunities to gain knowledge. Secondly, it provides personalized learning by adapting to each learner’s pace, which helps them to understand better and retain what they learn. Educational technology is also suitable for teachers, providing them with training and resources to effectively teach literacy skills (Hanemann & Krolak, 2017). Lastly, it can help to facilitate and involve parents in children’s learning because it can be used even in children’s homes.

In this study, we suppose our tools improve comprehension and analytical thinking, allow teachers to guide content use, and effectively follow pupils’ progress. It is important to note that our tools can be used in any language.

In the CG, players respond to claims picked from the content that they are supposed to learn by choosing whether it is true or false. The true claims express essential features of the core knowledge of the subject matter (e.g., a school lesson). The typical not true sentences (claims) represent common misunderstandings that the learners tend to have and help them, therefore, to get rid of these. This process encourages deeper thinking about the subject and fosters critical thinking skills. It simply reveals that not all words or sentences are equally important, which an early learner does not know.

To sum up. The CG was used in rural Zambia (Katete) after we had trained children (and without pushing their parents also to acquire the BRS using the GL technology. But to motivate them to continue reading, we described to parents how CG can make children to be able to improve their school results. However, the climate change-related material that we used for training the parents to comprehend written language was not connected to the content they had to learn by reading from their schoolbooks to improve their marks.

Various pilot studies we conducted (one of which is described in this article) showed that CG can be used to assist both adults and children in acquiring skills needed to comprehend written information (text and figures). This study, therefore, focused on exploring the use of CG technology to assist selected grade six learners in understanding the contents of chosen subjects they learnt in their everyday classroom interactions and determining if the use of this technology would give them a comparative advantage over their classmates who were not using CG.

Even though we intended to focus on grade six learners, in the pilot study we also included adults, ie. parents of the children who wanted to follow their children. The rationale behind this was to show the versatility of the CG and how it can empower whole families with comprehension skills essential for their progress and survival. In the introduction, we mentioned that many rural people face difficulties in acquiring basic literacy, let alone full literacy, and this covers most rural populations, including adults and children; therefore, there is a need to use CG to mitigate the roadblocks that the rural population faces in literacy acquisition. Our final study, however, explicitly picked children in school to show how CG can effectively help a specific population, in this case, grade six learners, improve their school performance, which ultimately leads to their success in school.

Methods 

The study involved two research phases. A pilot study preceded the main study. The selection of the methodological approach and design follows the objectives and interests set out in the study. The pilot study aims to show the versatility of CG and how they can be used to empower whole families with comprehension skills that are essential for their progress and survival. While the main study was focused on exploring the use of technology (CG) in assisting selected grade six learners to comprehend the contents of chosen subjects that they learnt in their everyday classroom interaction, and determine if the use of this technology would give them a comparative advantage over their classmates

The study, therefore, was developed using a quantitative approach, which is classified into experimental and non-experimental quantitative designs, differing mainly in manipulating variables (Hernández and Mendoza, 2018). It was oriented towards statistically investigating a phenomenon in its natural context. In this modality, the phenomenon is observed as it occurs in the natural environment, to obtain objective and measurable data through the use of instruments (tests).

The pilot study employed a pretest-posttest design, which measured a single group (comprising both adults and children) on the effects of climate change affecting their community. The group was given a pretest before the intervention, then the intervention was implemented, and then the same group was given a posttest after the intervention. The design was used to assess whether the CG had improved the groups’ knowledge of the effects of climate change on their community.

For the main study, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) was used to determine the effect of CG on the 6th-grade participants. One group of participants was randomly assigned to an intervention group while the other was assigned to a control group; however, the two groups were demographically matched. This design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of CG and to minimize bias and confounding variables. 

The Pilot Study. 

Participants: The participants were typically families. There were 24 participants in total, 9 males and 15 females, as shown in Table 1. The average age of the participants was 30.6 years, ranging between 13 and 54 years. All the participants were native speakers of the local language (ciNyanja), and they all had adequate literacy competency in this language, as confirmed by their use of the GraphoLearn game.

Gender	Frequency	Percent (%)
Male	9	37.5
Female	15	62.5
Total	24	100.0

Note. Table 1 shows the demographic details of the participants in the pilot study.

The collection of data: A paper and pencil cloze test with 20 multiple-choice questions was used to assess the participants’ initial reading skill and knowledge of the impact of climate change on their immediate environment.

The Main Study 

Participants. A total of 117 pupils were chosen from 3 grade six classes at Kaputu Primary School in Katete district of Eastern Province, 54 were boys and 63 were girls aged between 11 and 15 years old. Their demographic information is described in Table 2.

Demographics	Intervention Group	Control Group
Number of participants	59	58
Age range	11-14	11-15
Gender	35 girls and 24 boys	28 girls and 30 boys

Note. Table 2 shows the demographic information (number of participants, age range, and gender) of the participants of both the control and intervention groups.

The collection of data: Tests prepared and given to all pupils by the school at the end of the term were used as data collection instruments. All the end-of-term tests were in English; in the current Zambian primary school syllabus, all teaching and learning is done in a familiar Zambian language from grades 1-4. However, at grade 2. English is introduced as a subject after the children have acquired sufficient skills in their familiar language; it is believed that it is easier for them to transfer these skills to English (MESVTEE, 2013). Therefore, by the time they reach grade 6, it is expected that children have acquired enough proficiency to learn all subjects in English.

Study Design and Assessment Procedure 

The Pilot Study 

The purpose of the pilot was to test the mechanics of implementing the study, identify any potential difficulties, and develop effective strategies to address them. Therefore, its direct relevance was refining the optimal method of working. It was important to involve a wide spectrum of participants in this phase to ensure that the training effectively achieved full literacy for all.

This part of the study comprised an intervention study with a pre-test/post-test design. A sample of children and adults living in a low-income and low-literacy village in the rural Katete district of Zambia were loaned smartphones with the tools in question. First, the GraphoLearn-based game was used for learning basic reading skills (BRS).

After noting that a sufficient basic reading skill was acquired, the CG was used to help them learn climate change information under a research assistant’s supervision. Particular emphasis in the sentences was laid on instructing them to know the effects of climate change’s anticipated consequences, especially on their food security. The pilot was focused on validating the efficiency of how the mentioned sentences (claims) material works through training, to help understand any visually presented content, that is, not only text but also figures. Our goal was to train children and adults to learn to read with comprehension and motivate them to do that with a critical attitude. Thus, our goal was to help them learn through written content (using CG) how to cope with climate change-related challenges in today’s modern world.

The participants were given all the testing and training material in their spoken language. The tests comprised spoken questions on climate change relevant to the participants’ environmental conditions. The assessment was a close test comprising 20 sentences where words were removed, and the participants were asked to fill in the blank spaces. The test was used to assess reading comprehension, language proficiency, and vocabulary skills, competencies that GraphoLearn-based games (GG) and the CG were implemented to help them acquire.

The researcher made the pre-intervention assessment in the school environment. Then, phones were distributed to the participants, and the researcher instructed them to access and play the CG. After 10 days of exposure to the game, the participants were given a written post-exposure comprehension test to determine how much knowledge they had gained from playing the games.

The Main Study

Based on the pilot’s findings, we designed a study to equip primary school children with Full Literacy skills. Only such a reading skill is enough to help them learn effectively from written lesson texts in any curriculum content area.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of CG in a specific setting and based on the findings of the pilot, we selected school-going children who were learning independently from teachers, unbiased by our belief in the potential effectiveness of CG, and thus likely to view it with skepticism. As previously mentioned, although children in Zambia are initially taught in a familial language, they are introduced to English as a subject after two years. However, they continue learning in a familial language until grade four. It must be mentioned that research shows mixed results about their transitioning to competency in English literacy by the end of grade four (Mwanza & Nakamba, 2017; Mkandawire, 2017). They (learners) begin to achieve proficiency in English towards the end of the fifth grade. Therefore, since all subjects were taught in English, a deliberate effort was made to select these children as the study sample.

All the children were healthy with normal hearing and normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Before participation, all the participants were informed about the purpose of the study and that the information collected would be used for academic purposes only. Both adults and children in the pilot study gave consent for their participation. Parents of the children in the main study gave their consent through the head teacher of the school at which the children were learning; additionally, the participating children also gave their verbal consent after being fully informed about the purpose of the study. The Ethical Committee of the University of Jyväskylä approved the study, following the Declaration of Helsinki.

The 117 grade six children at a primary school in Kaputu village of Katete district were randomly selected to control and intervention groups. Fifty-nine (59) of the pupils were assigned to the intervention group and were given smartphones with CG to support their learning of lessons. The participants’ teachers were trained to convert topics of selected subjects into tokens to be used in the game. The aforementioned selected subjects were subjects that children were learning in school. Fifty-eight (58) other participants demographically equal to our intervention group were assigned to act as a control group. These children were learning the same lessons as our intervention group, but only through traditional teachers’ instruction without CG as support.

The selected subjects whose learning was assessed were Social Studies, Science, and Creative and Technology Studies (CTS). At the end of the term, our selected (both intervention and control groups), together with the rest of the school’s pupils, were given tests. We extracted the results of the total sample (control group and intervention group) and compared them.

The pupils were also subjected to a pre-assessment interview in which they were asked to state the number of books they have at home, how many specifically were meant for children, and how many were not related to school. They were also asked if they had ever visited any library.

The end-of-term tests, given to all the school’s pupils, were meant to assess the knowledge and skills pupils had acquired from what they had been learning. These comprehensive tests covered all the material learnt during the term. These tests included all subject areas in which our intervention group was allowed to learn using the CG (Social Studies, Science, and Creative and Technology Studies).

Statistical Analyses

All the statistical analyses of the current study were performed using the statistical package of IBM SPSS (version 22). In the pilot study, statistical analysis was performed to give answers to our research questions. First, we compared the participants´ performance (pre- and post-test) on the CG (CG) using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test (see Table 4). To determine the power of this test, a post-hoc power analysis was conducted that examined the difference in scores between the pre-test and the post-test. The observed effect size was (d=0.5), with a sample size of 24. The significance level was set at (alpha=0.05). The analysis revealed a post hoc power of 0.74, showing a 74% chance of detecting an effect. Power analysis was performed using G*Power 3.1(Bartlett, J.E., 2022). The Wilcoxon Signed-rank test was used to measure the performance of the subjects after they were exposed to CG and compare it to that of their pre-exposure performance.

For the main study, Mann-Whitney U-test was used first; to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the intervention group and the control groups concerning availability of reading materials in the participants’ homes and secondly; if the performance between control group and intervention group, on the three selected subjects, was also statistically significant. For the comparison of the difference in incidences of visits to the library between the two groups, a chi-square test was used. Additionally, a post-hoc power analysis using G*Power 3.1 was conducted to examine the difference in mean scores between the two groups (intervention and control group). The observed effect size was 0.5 with a total sample size of 117 (59 in the intervention group and 58 in the control group), and the significance level was (α = 0.05). The analysis showed a post-hoc power of 0.83, indicating an 83% chance of detecting an effect. See Table 3 for participants’ descriptive statistics on the availability of reading materials and visits to the library.

Assessments
Group	Intervention (59)		Control (57)
Values	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
How many books do you have at home?	4.15	2.29	4.37	1.94
How many children’s books do you have?	1.68	1.40	1.65	1.13
How many are not related to school?	1.66	1.47	1.95	1.37
Have you ever visited a library?	1.44	0.501	1.40	0.495

Note. Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) of the reading materials in the participants’ homes.

Results

The pilot

The results are summarized in a Wilcoxon signed-rank test and shown in Table 4, and they indicate that participants’ performance on the climate-change test was statistically higher for the post-test compared to the performance on the pretest, n = 24, z = -4.225, p = .001. The median score for the pretest (Mdn = 6) was significantly lower before the CG compared to the post-test, after using the game (Mdn = 10). As expected, the results indicate that the participants’ exposure to the content of the CG on the phone helped them increase their knowledge of the effects of climate change in their area. Therefore, the results suggest that the intervention significantly impacted participants’ performance using the CG. 

	Post-test score – Pretest score
Z	-4.225
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed)	0.001

Note. Table 4 presents the results of the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test used in the pilot study.

The main study

In the main study, we initially analyzed the responses from the preliminary interviews, where we asked pupils about the availability of reading materials in their homes and library visits. The results reveal that only 8% of the participants had more than five books available for reading at home, and a large portion (35%) were unsuitable for children’s reading. Only 38% percent of the available books were not related to school, and the participants reported that most (over 48%) were related to religion. Approximately 60% of the participants (57%) reported visiting a library.

We further compared the two groups to assess whether there was a significant difference in terms of the availability of reading materials in their homes and whether they visited a library.

	How many books do you have at home?	How many children’s books do you have?	How many are not related to school?
Mann-Whitney U	1539.000	1608.000	1402.000
Wilcoxon W	3309.000	3378.000	3172.000
Z	-.796	-.421	-1.609
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed)	.426	.674	.108

Note. Table 5 contains the results of the Mann-Whitney U test for the availability of reading materials

Table 5 shows the results of Mann-Whitney U tests conducted to assess whether there were significant differences between the two groups in terms of the availability of reading materials/books at home, the number of children’s books, and the number of books related to school. The results show the p values, p =.426 for the total number of books, p =.674 for children’s books, and p =.108 for non-school books. The results indicate that all p-values are greater than the conventional alpha level of .05, showing no statistically significant difference between the two groups.

	Have you ever visited a library?
Chi-Square	2.793a
df	1
Asymp. Sig.	0.095

Note. Table 6 contains the results of the chi-squared test for visits to a library

The association between visiting a library and performance on the CG was not statistically significant, X2 (N=117) = 2.79, p = .09

The next step was to compare the pupils’ end-of-term mean test scores to determine if they differed. As the graph below reveals, the results indicated that children who were exposed to their normal lessons in addition to using CG performed better in all three subjects compared to those who were only exposed to the traditional method of teaching (Figure 1).

Note. Comparison of the mean performance in the 3 subjects between the control group and the intervention group.

To determine whether the differences in scores were significant, we subjected the data to a Mann-Whitney U test. The test revealed a significant difference between the intervention group (mean rank 78.36), which was higher than the control group (mean rank = 40.64) on social studies, U = 628.00, z = -6.01, p = 001. Similarly, for Science, the intervention group results indicated a significant difference between the two groups, U = 717.00, z = -5.51, p = .001; the mean rank for the intervention group was 76.85, while the mean rank for the control group was 42.15. Lastly, the results for Creative Technology Studies showed a similar trend; there was a significant difference between the groups, U = 588.00, z = -6.21, p = .001. The intervention group’s mean rank was (79.03), which was higher than the control group’s mean rank (39.97), see Table 8. These findings indicate that the intervention group’s use of the CG improved their performance in the selected lessons.

	Social Studies	Science	Creative Technology Studies
Mann-Whitney U	628.000	717.000	588.000
Wilcoxon W	2398.000	2487.000	2358.000
Z	-6.005	-5.516	-6.213
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed)	.001	.001	.001

Note. Table 7 contains the Mann-Whitney U test for performance on the 3 subjects

Discussion 

This study aimed to test the efficacy of CG, a computer-based literacy learning game, in helping learners improve reading comprehension, for which a selected set of subjects was chosen to be learned in a rural school in Zambia. We compared the performance of an intervention group to that of a control group in selected subjects after one group (the intervention group) had been exposed to the use of CG to aid them in learning in a normal school setting. We used a Mann-Whitney U test to compare the mean performance in Social Studies, Science, and Creative and Technology studies and determine whether there was a significant difference between the two groups.

As expected, school achievements are better when academic school-based knowledge is gained after acquiring full literacy (FL). This comprises two skills: accurate and fluent basic decoding skills and the ultimate goal of reading, Full Literacy, which is the crucial skill needed for efficient and stress-free learning from schoolbooks. Butterfuss, Kim & Kendeou (2020) provide a comprehensive view of reading comprehension by explaining that it involves constructing a mental representation of the information in the text and shows the interplay between the reader, the text, and the activity, all situated in a broader socio-cultural context. Reading comprehension is a crucial component of full literacy, and it can be acquired either naturally by reading leisure books after learning decoding skills or by being specifically trained to learn the correct strategy of reading for learning.

Given the limited access to leisure reading materials in learners’ home environments, the current study employed the CG as an alternative tool for fostering incidental learning. Findings from the pilot phase indicated its effectiveness in promoting comprehension and retention. This aligns with the results of Tarigan, Sipahutar, and Harahap (2023), who reported that students utilizing interactive digital modules demonstrated significantly higher learning outcomes and memory retention than those taught using traditional methods. Their study reinforces the central premise of the current research: that well-designed digital tools, when actively engaging learners, can substantially enhance their capacity to identify, retain, and recall critical information. These findings are further supported by the work of Lyytinen and Louleli, whose evaluation of the CG similarly highlights its potential to bolster learning through interactive, game-based strategies.

The CG, as the name suggests, trains players to decode the texts they read and understand them. It is an interactive process that occurs not only while the players are reading but afterwards (when repeating as recommended when studying, e.g., school books), the use of the CG equips learners slowly with reading strategies, which are the basis of comprehension skills. One may say that Comprehension skills are fundamental to compelling reading (full literacy) and learning via reading to children who do not learn naturally to comprehend written language via leisure reading.

Full literacy is a necessary prerequisite for informing communities about, for example, relevant issues for their survival in this unstable world beset with worsening climatic conditions (Bourke et al, 2022; NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, 2022). And more generally, FL is the guaranteed way to succeed in school without stress because reading schoolbooks is a central part of every subject one needs to learn in school; additionally, these skills are integrated into everyday social interaction because they help organize communication to emphasize the essential points. Last but not least, CG’s strategy for training children to acquire FL also helps learners develop critical reading skills. Not all “news” today is true. One has to learn to be critical while reading and choose carefully what to believe (Saskoer, 2023).

The CG runs on all digital devices, including cheap Android phones, which is most realistic for African children, where families tend to own such devices today. It is essential to know that CG’s use is most effective in a noiseless environment where learners have opportunities to concentrate most effectively. Thus, it is recommended that CG be used in the home environment. We do not recommend using phones only at home.

The most challenging condition for effective use of the CG is the interest and skill of teachers to identify the content from lessons that the child is required to be able to store for her/his later life and do it in a form that is interesting enough for the child to attain. This and the technical skills required for the implementation require training, available on the comprehensiongame.com and given by people who have participated in running efficiency studies of the tools in their countries. The training of learners proceeds via ways that are more effective than how children typically try to learn their lessons. In this case, teachers need to implement the content via the software tool we call Comprehension Game Creator, to perform the implementation. The pages contain guidelines on how the content should be chosen for the implementation. We suppose that a good teacher knows that and is interested in learning how to pick the most informative sentences of the lessons that children have to be able to store in their memory (Kombe & Mwanza, 2019). The most challenging part of this duty is to formulate the sentences that contain the most informative part of the lesson in such a way that it is of sufficient interest to the learners.

The pilot study results showed that it is possible to provide the necessary literacy skills, even to people of rural communities who are illiterate, to access and interpret information effectively. The study not only showed that knowledge-starved rural dwellers were able to read and gain new information on issues that affected them personally and communally, but also information on how climate-change issues impacted their community. The related knowledge was higher for the post-test than for the pre-test performance. The median score for the pretest (Mdn = 6) was significantly lower before the CG compared to the post-test, after using the game (Mdn = 10). A vital example of this was the knowledge that these rural adults and children acquired (through reading the game’s content), the connection between the high cost of fertilizers used in farming and the outbreak of war in Ukraine. They also learned methods to overcome the consequences of too low or too high rainfall conditions using rotational cropping.

Full literacy can significantly enhance social interaction and collect crucial knowledge in rural communities in several ways. Literacy can improve communication because it enables people to communicate and interact with others effectively. Individuals can read, write, and understand information, crucial for daily survival and interaction. As shown in a study by Nshimbi and Serpell (2023), even basic literacy can promote increased participation in the community. But, only full literacy leads to substantial social inclusion via providing opportunity for effective communication and access to information from sources which provide knowledge available from sources which are outside of their local living environments, which is of importance in rural contexts because of lower levels of income, education, and health outcomes.

The Comprehension Game is versatile, too, and is needed to enhance the overall development and well-being of African rural communities and help them adapt to, e.g., the consequences of climate change. Naturally, these findings have to be replicated in other environments to become fully confident about the efficiency of the CG in helping all who need help learning via reading.

The study faced various limitations as outlined below: the study primarily focused on academic outcomes. Factors such as teacher involvement, parental support, and student motivation—each of which may significantly influence learning—were not analyzed for understanding the whole set of influences.

1. The participant sample was limited, and the study should be replicated with larger samples representing different relevant populations of people chosen to be studied from different environments.
2. The study showed that exposure to CG and the normal classroom learning helped our intervention group perform better than their classmates. It is. However, not sufficient for documenting any long-term impacts on educational outcomes and may require extended follow-up studies

Conclusions

The study demonstrates that exposure to the CG significantly improved pupils’ understanding of written language by showing how it had a meaningful impact on their academic performance. The pilot test also revealed a statistically significant increase in comprehension scores following the use of the game, suggesting enhanced content engagement and learning. These findings support the positive effects of integrating mobile learning tools such as the CG into educational strategies, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Another avenue worth exploring is how teachers can integrate mobile tools in their lessons effectively. This will determine whether their involvement (teachers) amplifies or diminishes the tool’s effectiveness. It would be interesting to see how the teacher’s learning to follow the guidelines for implementing adequate content in the game from the schoolbooks elevates their interest and skills to carefully consider what the key learning is from the schoolbooks that children need to be able to store for their future life. One could ask – does it elevate their teacherhood in this way?

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the teachers, parents, and children who made the study possible. We would also like to thank the community leaders and the whole community of Kaputu for allowing us access to their village and interacting with us

Funding: This study did not receive a specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Ethical Approval: The study was approved by the University of Jyväskylä’s ethical committee following the Declaration of Helsinki.

Author contributions: This is the version Heikki Lyytinen updated from the article submitted for publication, in which Jacob C. Nshimbi is the first author. Lyytinen and Nshimbi contributed to the conception and design of the empirical study. Nshimbi performed material preparation, data collection, and analysis. Nshimbi wrote the draft of the submitted manuscript. We thank Natalia Louleli for providing helpful comments on the published versions of the manuscript.

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