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Research & Publications
about Yiya
These publications highlight the insights and impact of Yiya's innovative work.
Although technology is ubiquitous in the homes and classrooms in the Global North, access to educational technology in the Global South is still out of reach for much of the population. This work describes an educational technology system, Yiya Air Science, to reach “last mile” students in Africa (specifically rural Uganda) where access to basic computers or smartphones is rare. Courses are deployed on a system of radio broadcast and basic texting phones (USSD). Yiya Air Science has deployed three courses focused on STEM skills and entrepreneurship as key learning outcomes. In this research, we are adopting state of the art learning science and engineering principles with fine-grained data collection and a continuous improvement loop.
Citation: Kwon, C., Butler, R., Stamper, J., Ogan, A., Forcier, A., Fitzgerald, E., & Wambuzi, S. (2023). Learning analytics for last mile students in Africa. In Companion Proceedings 13th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK23).
The Doer Effect states that completing more active learning activities, like practice questions, is more strongly related to positive learning outcomes than passive learning activities, like reading, watching, or listening to course materials. Although broad, most evidence has emerged from practice with tutoring systems in Western, Industrialized, Rich, Educated, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations in North America and Europe. Does the Doer Effect generalize beyond WEIRD populations, where learners may practice in remote locales through different technologies? Through learning analytics, we provide evidence from N = 234 Ugandan students answering multiple-choice questions via phones and listening to lectures via community radio. Our findings support the hypothesis that active learning is more associated with learning outcomes than passive learning. We find this relationship is weaker for learners with higher prior educational attainment. Our findings motivate further study of the Doer Effect in diverse populations. We offer considerations for future research in designing and evaluating contextually relevant active and passive learning opportunities including leveraging familiar technology, increasing the number of practice opportunities, and aligning multiple data sources.
Citation: Butler, D., Borchers, C., Asher, M. W., Lee, Y., Karnataki, S., Dangi, S., Athreya, S., Stamper, J., Ogan, A., & Carvalho, P. F. (2025). Does the Doer Effect Generalize To Non-WEIRD Populations? Toward Analytics in Radio and Phone-Based Learning. In Proceedings of the 15th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK '25) (pp. 844–850). Association for Computing Machinery.
External Research
Publications by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Despite the best intentions to support equity with educational technologies, they often lead to a “rich get richer” efect, in which communities of more advantaged learners gain greater beneft from these solutions. Efective design of these technologies necessitates a deeper understanding of learners in understudied contexts and their motivations to pursue an education. Consequently, we studied a 15-week remote course launched in 2021 with 17,896 learners that provided engineering education through a radio and phone-based system aimed for use in rural settings within Northern Uganda. We address shifts in learners’ motivations for course participation and investigate the impact of demographic features and motivations of students on persistence and performance. We found signifcant increases in student motivation to learn more about and pursue STEM. Importantly, the course was most successful for learners in demographics who typically experience fewer educational opportunities, showing promise for such technologies to close opportunity gaps.
Citation: Christine Kwon, Darren Butler, Judith Odili Uchidiuno, John Stamper, andAmy Ogan. 2024. Investigating Demographics and Motivation in Engineering Education Using Radio and Phone-Based Educational Technologies. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Most learners worldwide are multilingual, yet implementing multilingual education remains challenging in practice. EdTech offers an opportunity to bridge this gap and expand access for linguistically diverse learners. We conducted a quasi-experiment in Uganda with 2,931 participants enrolled in a non-formal radio- and mobile-based engineering course, where learners self-selected instruction in Leb Lango (a local language), English, or a Hybrid option combining both languages. The Leb Lango version of the course was used disproportionately by learners from rural areas, those with less formal education, and those with lower prior knowledge, broadening participation among disadvantaged learners. Moreover, the availability of Leb Lango instruction was associated with higher active participation, even among learners who registered for English instruction. Although Leb Lango learners began with lower performance, they demonstrated faster learning gains and achieved comparable final examination outcomes to English and Hybrid learners. These results suggest that providing local language options to learners is an effective way to make EdTech more accessible.
Citation: Moletsane, P. P., Asher, M. W., Kwon, C., Carvalho, P. F., & Ogan, A. (2026). Inclusive mobile learning: How technology-enabled language choice supports multilingual students. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26). Association for Computing Machinery.
