Neurocognition and Learning in Côte d’Ivoire
Promoting Literacy Development in Children in Rural Cocoa Producing Communities
How does inconsistent access to language and reading instruction in a new language impact literacy outcomes? How can we best design policies to ameliorate the negative consequence of poverty on literacy? As part of the Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities (TRECC) program and with a team of Ivorian graduate students, we are conducting a cognitive, linguistic, and reading assessment in children growing up in rural cocoa communities in Côte d’Ivoire. We combine behavioral indicators of literacy development with portable neuroimaging using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to shed new light on brain development in impoverished and adverse conditions. Children in these communities face many challenges to learning to read: high poverty rates, poor school attendance, and child labor in cocoa agriculture. Children face the added challenge of learning to read in a new language, French, different from the language spoken in their community. Education is almost exclusively French, while there are over 60 languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. Our combined brain-behavior approach allows us to apply the latest tools of cognitive neuroscience to advance the study of global child development.
Research Team: Dr. Hermann Akpé, Dr. Fabrice Tanoh
Funding:
Executive Functions and Reading
Disadvantaged living environments characterized by economic insecurity, nutritional deficiencies, and poor stimulation may undermine development of basic cognitive skills that support academic learning and school success. Executive functions (inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility), are crucial components of cognitive development that support a child’s academic outcomes, including literacy. Executive function development is particularly susceptible to the negative impact of poverty because the brain region that support these skills is late to mature and therefore remains sensitive to environmental effects throughout childhood. Although recent studies have started to show how poverty-related factors affect executive function skills of children growing up in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), the role that executive functions play in promoting academic outcomes in these settings remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine how executive functions support children’s literacy in an environment with high, poverty-related, risk of illiteracy.
Research Team: Jelena Obradovic (Stanford), Amy Ogan (CMU), Joelle Hannon-Cropp (UDelaware, PhD student), Faryal Khan (UofT, M.Ed. Student)
Memory Development and Reading
Children in high-income countries (HICs) typically start school by age 6, but many children around the world may start as late as age 12. Such a high variability in age when beginning school raises the question: Does the developmental landscape of older first-time readers (disproportionately from low- and middle-income countries; LMICs) impact how children learn to read? In this study, we test how developing memory systems support learning to read for younger versus older first-time readers (9-15 years).
Research Team: Joelle Hannon-Cropp (PhD student)
Ivorian Children's Language Assessment Toolkit
The Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit is a language assessment battery for primary school-aged children available in Abidji, Attié, Baoulé, and Bété languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. The Toolkit was developed by the BOLD lab research team in consultation with Ivorian linguists and native speakers of Abidji, Attié, Baoulé, and Bété. The Toolkit measures children’s phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness.
The Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit is a language assessment battery for primary school-aged children available in Abidji, Attié, Baoulé, and Bété languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. The Toolkit measures phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness.
There are over 60 languages spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, while the official language is French. Most children attend school in French, a language they may not speak at home and in the community. This is particularly true in rural regions where most children are bilingual in a local language and in French, and many only learn French when starting school. Language assessments conducted in French only measure a bilingual child’s language skills in one of their two languages, often their non-native language. Language assessments in a child’s native language (rather than in French) are not available. Our research team developed the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit to fill this critical gap.
To date, we have administered the Toolkit to over 2,000 primary-school children in the Adzope, Sikensi, Thiebissou, and Soubre regions of Côte d’Ivoire. Forthcoming publications from our lab report our findings and psychometric measures for the Toolkit. Our goal is to build a larger dataset that would generate test norms.
A copy of the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit is freely available to researchers. The Toolkit includes an instruction manual and assessment forms (in French). If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Kaja Jasińska.