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Reading connects us to other people’s messages through the written word. It allows us to “dialogue” internally to build ideas, establish new positions, or reinforce existing ones. Reading competency is relevant because it allows us to incorporate various voices and perspectives into our thinking and construct comprehensive plural positions critically. Therefore, it allows us to create rich and complex solutions to the different challenges of life. For professional life, reading competency is an essential asset for responding to the needs of an organization, its customers, and society. As we develop this competency, we can incorporate diversity into our critical thinking and problem-solving.
Bakhtin (1986) describes intertextual dialogue as the process of reading to generate an internal indirect dialogue with the person who has written a text and confront ideas acquired elsewhere, for example, from reading. From a sociocultural perspective, Gadamer (1996) explains that we are precisely the product of the baggage we accumulate through our various readings, and intertextual dialogue allows us to interpret new ones.
Mexico’s deficit in reading and interpretation
OECD member countries (Organization for Economic Development) have agreed that reading proficiency is critical to building the future through development. For this reason, to promote training in this competency, the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) measures the status of young people in this crucial competency every three years. Mexico needs to do better. In the most recent test in 2022, Mexico had a mean of 415 points, notably below the average for OECD countries, 476 points (OECD, 2023). This result is concerning because 47% of the population tested did not reach level 2, which represents the basic competency to discern the primary themes of a text and comprehend its purpose. Thus, almost half of young people in Mexico need more competency to extract explicit information from a text, considering they are just three years from starting their professional training.
According to Montes Silva and López Bonilla (2017), teachers must remember that the approach to reading competency has the potential to fathom ideas that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend. These ideas continuously create new solutions for professional practice and daily life. In other words, not only do you need to read more, but you also need to know how to interpret what you read.
Regarding incorporating technologies to boost educational work, Grynyuk et al. (2022) found that students are motivated by a familiar, attractive, and modern world, but teachers sometimes maintain the traditional, educational one. For this reason, a group of PrepaTec teachers considered integrating technologies to motivate students by making reading competency training more attractive through an innovative digital platform.
Lëttëra is a platform for developing reading competency.
In 2020, a group of PrepaTec teachers developed a platform to strengthen reading proficiency. It is an online platform called Lëttëra (Leal Uhlig, Garza León, Cruz Vargas, Hernández Franco, and Portuguez-Castro, 2023) that incorporates gamification elements. The project was possible thanks to the NOVUS support of Tecnologico de Monterrey, a fund for educational experimentation and innovation.
The Lëttëra platform presents various complex, multi-level texts to develop reading competency considered by the OECD. There are eight levels of reading proficiency (1c, 1b, 1a, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). For the OECD, the primary target level is 2, which indicates the ability to identify the main ideas of a moderately long text and interpret what is presented explicitly, albeit complexly, through reading different parts of the text. Level 3 proficiency represents the ability to contrast various texts with different perspectives and make inferences about non-explicit content.
The OECD reading proficiency levels are:
- Level 1c. The literal meanings of texts with simple and short syntax are understood.
- Level 1b. The literal meanings of text are understood by making simple connections with adjacent statements.
- Level 1a. The literal meanings are understood in short passages, and irrelevant information can be discerned.
- Level 2. Main ideas are identified explicitly, though complexly, despite distractors in multiple passages.
- Level 3. Non-explicit interpretations of different text parts are integrated to understand the main idea.
- Level 4. Complex inferences are made from different forms of expression in multiple texts, and the position of the author(s) is interpreted.
- Level 5. Extensive texts are understood, and the relevance of the content is evaluated, allowing for critical evaluations and conclusions to be drawn.
- Level 6. Multiple long texts are evaluated and comprehended; compared perspectives allow for critical intertextual judgments and taking a critical stance.
The first version of Lëttëra works on developing reading competency from levels 1c to 3. Through the Lëttëra platform, high school students come into contact with carefully selected attractive, agile texts with a reward system to motivate them to use the different skills corresponding to these reading levels. Note that the platform’s purpose extends beyond reading and responding. It is an educational tool that appropriately guides students to break down each text with different degrees of complexity into direct, clear, and digestible explanations. Lëttëra presents a journey using a virtual map that allows access to various challenges in the reading and interpreting activities of the texts.
These activities were introduced in different classes, such as Spanish Language, Art, and Culture in PrepaTec, to accompany the teaching work and provide a complementary tool for interventions beyond traditional education.
The measurement was carried out in the first intervention with Lëttëra by adapting the Planea 2017 test with a scale of 0 to 50 possible points. The results showed that the platform group obtained a higher average learning gain than the control group. We replicate the intervention in classes on one PrepaTec campus. On average, those who used the platform scored almost two points more on the final exam (Leal Uhlig, Garza León, Cruz Vargas, Hernández Franco, & Portuguez-Castro, 2023).
In a second iteration, Lëttëra was applied to three PrepaTec campuses. Again, the groups that used it attained a higher average learning gain than the control groups, reaching a four-point difference in one case.
These results laid the groundwork for the team of teachers to establish a collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Nuevo León to extend the reach of Lëttëra’s benefits.
Lëttëra for public and private education
The Lëttëra platform was used in different public high school schools in the municipalities comprising the Metropolitan Area of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, to attend the results obtained in the PISA 2022 test. Because of the good results obtained through the platform, the teachers worked hand in hand with the state authority to implement it.
At the beginning of the August-December 2023 school year, students were given a test based on PISA and another at the end of the school year to compare the results. The encouraging news was that the reading proficiency score increased and the improvement in reading proficiency was substantial. As mentioned before, the levels set by the OECD identify level 2 as the basic level, and Mexico placed 47% of its student population below this level. Lëttëra, as a complementary and support tool, enabled the students who performed the most challenges on the platform to improve their scores from level 1a to level 2.
It means that Lëttëra can be an effective complement in normalizing young students’ reading competency levels. Of course, challenges continue to exist to guarantee the conscious and effective use of the platform. Still, in cases where this had occurred with a pedagogical intention to support this technological application well, the impact was improving the reading competency below the primary level.
It is a challenging task, and it requires teachers’ openness to rethink traditional methods to incorporate technological tools that complement the teaching work. If we, as teachers, want to promote better futures for our youth, we must work on the foundations that allow the development of complex thinking schemes. We, as citizens, need to find a way to dialog, co-construct, and propose innovative solutions; we must work on the foundations that train them first to discern and interpret arguments from other places. Thus far, Lëttëra has proven to be a functional, intentional technology that positively impacts people and cannot be left behind in the educational process.
Reflection
The experience with Lëttëra reflects at least two conditions worth pondering. First, it proves that technology alone does not provide solutions if it is not supported by pedagogical intention. Lëttëra works because it is planned based on internationally agreed parameters, and teachers designed the feedback it employs. Teachers include in each text a digestible exposition for students of what they should be reading and why. The option of multiple opportunities to respond continuously invites students to keep trying based on what they learned with each attempt, which is also a valuable lesson for life.
The second situation is just as critical. Students are aware of their deficiencies in reading skills. We found that those with such committed awareness autonomously self-regulate could level themselves up with the available resources. The students from a lower level who completed the highest number of non-mandatory challenges improved, reflecting their commitment and effort. It works if the system or platform incentivizes and is not punitive or exhibitory.
We hope that this experience motivates more educators to veer from the straight line as Emilia, Xóchitl, Carolina, and Sheyla did, to continue making conscious efforts to implement technologies, always to vindicate the humanity of those who teach and those who learn.
About the Author
David Santamaría Cid de León (david.santamaria@tec.mx) is an impact measurement researcher at the Institute for the Future of Education at Tecnologico de Monterrey. He is a postgraduate professor at the School of Humanities and Education and has a Ph.D. in Educational Innovation in Sociocultural Studies. David works with dialogic education and citizenship development.
References
Bajtín, M. (1986). Problemas estéticos y literarios. La Habana: Arte y Literatura.
Freire, P. (1967/2013). La educación como práctica de la libertad. México: Siglo XXI.
Gadamer, H.G. (1996). Verdad y método. Salamanca: Sígueme.
Grynyuk, S., Kovtun, O., Sultanova, L., Zheludenko, M., Zasluzhena, A., & Zaytseva, I. (2022). Distance Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: the Experience of Ukraine’s Higher Education System. Electronic Journal of E-learning, 20(3), pp 242-256.
Leal Uhlig, E.F., Garza León, C., Cruz Vargas, X., Hernández Franco, S., and Portuguez-Castro, M. (2023) Lëttëra web platform: A game-based learning approach with the use of technology for reading competence. Frontiers in education, 8:1180283. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1180283
Montes Silva, M.E. López Bonilla, G. (2017). Literacidad y alfabetización disciplinar: enfoques teóricos y propuestas pedagógicas. Perfiles Educativos, 39(155), 162-178.
OECD (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en
Sucena, A., Silva, A. F., & Marques, C. (2022). Reading Skills Intervention During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9(1).
Editing
Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Editor of the Edu bits articles and producer of The Observatory webinars- “Learning that inspires” – Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education at Tec de Monterrey.
Translation
Daniel Wetta
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