For phase I, $20,000 is requested, to be spent over a 3 month period. The PI will travel to Tamil Nadu, enlist local teachers and other resources to work with him including women who will have better access to the female population, refine the instrument with improved drawings, as well as add ``A-for-Apple'' words for each letter (with pictures). Then two sets of villages will be visited on at least two occasions each, perhaps on visits by, for example, the field medical services van of the Christian Medical Center in Vellore, India, which travels into the countryside to administer vaccinations and provide medical treatment for poor rural folk. Subjects will be asked to volunteer to help, names recorded, home locations determined for later followup; then each one will be administered a simple literacy test, along the lines of ``Say that letter''. In the first set of villages, the instrument will be given to the subject with a scripted short presentation, along the lines of this:
This paper will teach you how to read. See these pictures, showing air flowing through nose, vibration in the throat, lips closed, what is that? [m], yes, [m]. Now you have the idea, go study and learn them. Goodbye.
In the second set of villages, the instrument will not be provided, this difference being the independent variable of the experiment.
Then after a delay of two to four weeks, we will return to locate the same subjects, and re-administer the literacy test (and give the instrument to the subjects who had not received it the previous time around). If the test scores improve more for the subjects who received the instrument than for those who didn't, we may infer that the instrument made a difference, and we can also estimate how big a difference it made for what percentage of subjects.
We have budgeted what we think is enough time to get the ball rolling, to make the right kind of contacts, to modify and improve the instrument, and to be able to run enough subjects to measure differences of as little as 10% of the population.
Potential obstacles include being unable to locate some proportion of subjects for later followup, difficulties in enlisting the right kind of local resources, dialect variation in the subject population making the instrument inapplicable within that region or social group (caste), cross-communication between subject villages, etc. Allocating extra time and selecting sites and subject populations carefully will solve these problems, we believe.
If time permits we will also do a longer-term followup on the same subjects, to see whether improvements in literacy are extended, and to confirm whether the later recipients of the instrument also had the same benefit.
Results will be recorded, statistics calculated, and a project report will be written, describing procedures used for the development and deployment of the instrument, along with detailed estimates of its effectiveness and the cost of large-scale deployment.
With regard to the budget of later phases, the costs will be highly dependent on the methodologies worked out; therefore to develop estimates of cost and scaleability will be an important component of the first phase.
We anticipate that it will be ultimately be important to solicit the financial participation and support of a variety of charitable and government institutions, considering that the multiplier N referred to above may remain large and that the number of languages and people to be addressed will overwhelm the resources of any one such institution.
Early sponsors will have an important role in this later phase, acting not just as a direct benefactor, but also as a catalyst among charitable and government organizations. As the project gradually increases in scale, it is likely that the direct financial contributions of the initial sponsors may be less important than their contacts, prestige, and leadership abilities, in bringing forth and coordinating sufficient resources to build and sustain a growth trajectory for the application of this method up to the size of this global problem.
However the key initially is simply to show that it can be done, to show how to do it, and to show how little it can cost: We intend to try it out, refine it for maximum effectiveness, and build a detailed case for widespread deployment. Once this is done, then through your support, the participation of many organizations and people may be brought to bear. Ultimately it is to be hoped that everyone in the world who wants to learn to read should have access to materials which will enable him or her to do it, even without access to a teacher.