Given Hapunda

174 Introduction One of the final stages of the monitoring and evaluation process involves communicating the results of your research. This is a very important component because it renders the research relevant, meaningful and beneficial to various stakeholders and various segments of society. What would be the point of conducting research if it does not benefit or add value to society? This chapter will discuss communication of results. It will begin with a brief explanation on what communication is and the importance of communicating and reporting your research results. This will be followed by the different modes of communication that can be used, depending on the audience. Focus Box 1: The GraphoGame Intervention in Zambia Study The above mentioned study was conducted by the Centre for Promotion of Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa (CAPOLSA) in collaboration with the University of Jyväskylä. It was funded under the All Children Reading Project: A Grand Challenge for Development with partners USAID, World Vision and Australian Aid. The study was conducted as a pilot study to establish if ICT could be used to improve literacy skills of early grade learners and literacy teaching skills of first grade teachers. A literacy game, GraphoGame, was used as an intervention for the learner, while a GraphoGame teacher training website was used to impart information on how to teach literacy in the local languages and information about how to help struggling readers. This study was conducted in the Eastern Province of Zambia. Baseline, midline and endline data was collected from 30 schools (15 intervention and 15 control schools) using GraphoGame and the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). During the course of the project monitoring of the project was conducted via phone calls and site visits to the intervention schools. On a weekly basis GraphoGame play logs were downloaded from the GraphoGame server. These logs provided detailed information for each of the intervention schools. It included information such as whether or not learners were exposed to the game in that week and if so, how long did the learners play for? How far in the game did they progress? Which specific learners played and how much progress did the learners make? If this information was not on the server for a particular school, the school would be contacted to find out if they had any challenges and what could be done to help. As most teachers had not worked with ICT in education, it was important to provide them the necessary technical support to help them conduct the intervention correctly. This was done to determine the fidelity of implementation of the project. Based on this and other data from the project, various changes to the research design were made to make it more realistic and attainable. Quarterly progress and financial reports were prepared and shared with the funders, who uploaded our progress reports onto their website. Updates on the progress of the project were given to the funders on a fortnightly basis via email. During the duration of the project, stakeholder consultative meetings were held with different organisations in the field of education as well as various funders. Stakeholders included the Ministry of General Education, Curriculum Development Centre, Teacher Education and Specialised Services, various NGO’s, FBO’s and funders such as JICA, USAID and DFID. This provided the opportunity to meet other stakeholders and learn about the work they were doing. The meetings provided good networking opportunities and possibilities for future collaborations. Experiences on the project were shared through various forums such as conference presentations, articles and stakeholder workshops. A series of dissemination workshops will be conducted at the end of the project. These catered for different audiences such as stakeholders, policy makers and the teachers who took part in the study.