Building Social Connections through Literacy: Social Creatures partners with NABU to launch “NABU Learning Labs”
Social Creatures has teamed up with NABU to create “NABU Learning Labs,” a collaborative research initiative aimed at producing strategic, data-driven growth of NABU’s on-the-ground practices, while also producing more inclusive, equitable, and actionable research on the science of learning and social connection as it pertains to literacy development. Via the initiative’s “multiplying impact” model, Social Creatures and NABU are working together to co-produce, implement, and disseminate knowledge that maximizes the impact of research, policy, and practice in an equitable and inclusive way.
One of our goals at Social Creatures is to partner with organizations to further our mission of providing individuals and families with equitable opportunities to build and maintain social connections. One such collaboration is with the nonprofit organization, NABU, who is working to increase literacy rates of children in developing countries through their reading app, which is distributed to families via a network of local community-based Reading Ambassadors.
But what does literacy have to do with building social connections? First and foremost, having the ability to read and write is fundamental to communicating and connecting with others, especially when building social connections with individuals outside of one’s immediate social circle. As such, literacy is foundational to ensuring that an individual has equitable opportunities to forge social connections, as well as to access the resources made available through those relationships (collectively referred to as “social capital”).
Experts have also long recognized that literacy and social-emotional development build on and reinforce each other [1,2]. For instance, connecting with characters through book reading helps children develop perspective taking and empathy, and reduces prejudice [3,4]. These skills are critical to social-emotional development and can even increase feelings of belongingness and social connectedness [5,6]. And joint book reading between family members provides additional opportunities to strengthen social connections, such as parent-child relationships [7,8].
Simply put, literacy provides many pathways for social connection. Yet UNESCO estimates that there are still 773 million adults and nearly 250 million youth that cannot read or write a simple sentence.
NABU is on a mission to eradicate illiteracy by addressing the imbalance in the creation and distribution of children's books globally, so all children can fully develop their reading skills. In their own words, NABU says that "40% of children globally do not have access to books in a language they speak or understand. Through our app, we are providing inclusive and equitable access to literacy, ensuring every child can read and rise to their full potential." Their reading app currently targets 250 million children in developing countries—including Rwanda, Kenya, and Haiti—who have virtually no access to books published in their native language.
Social Creatures has teamed up with NABU to help quantify and multiply the impact of their services, so that children everywhere are afforded equal opportunities to build literacy skills and social connections. The collaboration is being funded in part by the Schmidt Futures Forum on Learning Tools Competition, a global competition aimed at developing novel technologies to combat student learning loss from the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of this year, NABU, in collaboration with Social Creatures, was named one of the winners of this competition, receiving funding to transform their low bandwidth reading app into a learning tool that accelerates children’s literacy gains. As a result of this award, Social Creatures and NABU have created “NABU Learning Labs,” where we conduct research projects to drive strategic, data-driven growth of NABU’s programs.
NABU Learning Labs recently completed its inaugural research project. In line with NABU’s mission to solve the literacy crisis in developing countries by providing children’s books in mother tongue languages, the main question of our study asked: “Does access to mother tongue books increase reader engagement in Rwanda?”
To begin to answer this question, book choices and engagement levels within the NABU reading app were tracked, and NABU’s community-based Reading Ambassador program in Rwanda was rapidly transformed into a team of on-the-ground data collectors, to survey a subset of NABU readers. Early findings from the study revealed three key insights:
NABU users in Rwanda are more engaged with and prefer dual-language storybooks that contain both English and Kinyarwanda versions of the stories. Survey respondents helped to contextualize these findings, by indicating that dual-language books help children more easily learn to read and speak in English.
While many NABU users display high levels of reading within the NABU app, not all users are consistently and substantially engaging with reading materials in the app. Ongoing research is assessing the effectiveness of SMS alerts—sent to users when new books are published on the NABU app—in driving up reading engagement, with early test runs showing promising results.
The study’s survey findings spurred follow-up research questions related to home reading environments in Rwanda, which will be further explored by NABU in upcoming research projects. Specifically, questions were raised regarding what age Rwandans typically begin reading to children in the home, as well as the role older siblings might be able to play in creating a “culture of reading” for younger siblings in the home.
While research is still ongoing, this study provides some insight into NABU’s Rwandan user base, including their reading patterns, home reading environments (including joint reading experiences), and content preferences.
Our “multiplying impact” model.
Through the creation of NABU Learning Labs, NABU and Social Creatures are working together to ensure that equitable access to literacy materials translates to meaningful literacy gains for children. Through pursuit of this goal, we are also producing more inclusive and equitable research on the science of learning and social connection. The science of learning and social connection as it pertains to child literacy is predominantly based on studies in developed areas such as the United States, Canada, and Europe with primarily white, middle class participants. Although these studies are important, they are hardly generalizable to the rest of the world. Such studies do not capture the different social and cultural factors that shape child development, and consequently limit our scientific understanding of how children learn and grow.
NABU Learning Labs is helping to overcome these barriers by providing researchers with data from traditionally under-researched cultures and countries that can be used to develop and test new theories of learning. To this end, we are employing a multiplying impact model, whereby we utilize an “open science” framework to increase accessibility to the data and research findings. Specifically, NABU Learning Labs are currently openly sharing their (fully de-identified) data sets with academic researchers at Social Creatures, New York University’s ISLAND lab, and Mount Sinai’s Charles Lazarus Children’s Abilities Research Center, to multiply the impact of the findings beyond the walls of NABU. Furthermore, we are providing rapid, easily digestible reports of our research projects’ findings to community actors, as well as to the general public (via publications on our websites and mailing lists). Through this work, NABU Learning Labs is not only producing data-driven growth of NABU programming, but also contributing novel, cross-cultural data on the science of learning and social connection to the broader academic community, on-the-ground changemakers, and the general public.
It is our hope that NABU Learning Labs will inspire academic researchers and on-the-ground organizations to work together to co-produce, implement, and disseminate knowledge that informs and maximizes the impact of research, policy, and practice in an equitable and inclusive way.
In-text references
[1] Grøver, V., Rydland, V., Gustafsson, J. E., & Snow, C. E. (2020). Shared Book Reading in Preschool Supports Bilingual Children’s Second‐Language Learning: A Cluster‐Randomized Trial. Child development, 91(6), 2192-2210.
[2] Miles, S. B., & Stipek, D. (2006). Contemporaneous and longitudinal associations between social behavior and literacy achievement in a sample of low‐income elementary school children. Child development, 77(1), 103-117.
[3] Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science (New York, N.Y.), 342(6156), 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1239918
[4] Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D., & Trifiletti, E. (2015). The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45(2), 105-121.
[5] Baumeister, R. F., & Lobbestael, J. (2011). Emotions and antisocial behavior. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 22(5), 635-649.
[6] Paravati, E., Naidu, E., & Gabriel, S. (2021). From “love actually” to love, actually: The sociometer takes every kind of fuel. Self and Identity, 20(1), 6-24.
[7] Dowdall, N., Melendez‐Torres, G. J., Murray, L., Gardner, F., Hartford, L., & Cooper, P. J. (2020). Shared picture book reading interventions for child language development: A systematic review and meta‐analysis. Child development, 91(2), e383-e399.
[8] Barratt-Pugh, C., & Rohl, M. (2015). ‘Better Beginnings has made me make reading part of our everyday routine’: Mothers' Perceptions of a Family Literacy Program Over Four Years. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 40(4), 4-12.