Ayorkor Mills-Tettey is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She grew up in Nigeria and Ghana, and then moved to the U.S. for university in 1997. She majored in Computer Science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and then stayed at Dartmouth for a Masters Degree at the Thayer School of Engineering. In 2003, she returned to Ghana to spend a year teaching computer science at Ashesi University in Accra before joining the Robotics Institute in 2004.

Ayorkor’s current research focuses on robotic path planning. She is also very interested in understanding the synergies between technology and education, especially in developing communities.

One contributing factor to the low reading proficiency of some children in Ghana may be lack of opportunity to practice reading, particularly guided reading. For the average Ghanaian child from a rural or low-income urban background, reading may not be part of daily family life and schools typically offer few opportunities for individual attention while developing reading skills.

This field study investigates the effects of two approaches to guided reading practice: using the LISTEN Reading Tutor and regular reading practice with an older, literate youth. The LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology Enables) reading tutor is an automated reading tutor, in development at Carnegie Mellon University since 1996, that uses speech recognition and artificial intelligence to analyze a child’s reading and give graphical and spoken feedback.

This initial pilot phase of the study in Ghana aims to investigate the feasibility of the technology in the Ghanaian setting.

The second phase will be aimed at measuring the efficacy of the reading tutor compared to regular practice with an older youth, in helping children improve their reading skills. This second phase is scheduled for Spring 2006 with both Jack Mostow and Anthony Stentz as faculty advisors.