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Interactive radio is a technique to promote active listening to educational radio programs targeted at students and teachers in Third World countries. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has supported interactive radio in Africa, Asia, and Latin American to provide supplementary training to students with poorly prepared teachers. An example was a language arts program in Kenya, where evaluators concluded that radio students were consistent in their statistically significant superiority over control students in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Despite these findings, other studies concluded that interactive radio is better for teaching math, which has a limited number of correct answers, than language. USAID also has funded interactive radio projects in science, mathematics, teacher training, and high-school equivalency. Some critics of interactive radio say it is too dependent on expensive hardware and that Third World students are not well enough motivated, cannot read well enough, and cannot work well enough on their own for distance education to significantly affect educational progress in developing nations. (Contains 9 references.) (Author)

an: ED367304; docTypes: Reports - Descriptive ; Speeches/Meeting Papers; pubTypes: Conference PaperReport;