This toolkit is the product of ongoing collaboration among a large community of scholars, practitioners, government officials, and education development professionals to advance the cause of early reading assessment and acquisition among primary school children in low-income countries. Extensive peer review comments for this toolkit and suggestions for instrument development were provided by Marcia Davidson, Sandra Hollingsworth, Sylvia Linan-Thompson, and Liliane Sprenger-Charolles. Development of EGRA would not have been possible without the support of the nongovernmental organization and Ministry of Education EGRA Evaluation Teams of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, The Gambia, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Nicaragua, Niger, Peru, Senegal, and South Africa. Our deepest gratitude goes to the teachers, the students, and their families for their participation and continued faith in the benefits of education. In repayment we will diligently seek to improve reading outcomes for all children around the world. Amber Gove is responsible for primary authorship of the toolkit, with contributions from Luis Crouch, Amy Mulcahy-Dunn, and Marguerite Clarke; editing support was provided by Erin Newton. The opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the World Bank. Please direct questions or comments to Amber Gove at agove@rti.org.

In order to obtain feedback on and confirm the validity of the draft Early Grade Reading Assessment, RTI convened a meeting of cognitive scientists, early-grade literacy experts, research methodologists, and assessment experts to review the proposed key components of the draft assessment instruments. During the 2-day workshop, participants were charged with bridging the gap between research and practice; that is, merging advances in the reading literature and cognitive science with assessment experiences. Researchers and practitioners presented evidence on their strategies for measuring literacy acquisition within the early primary grades. In addition, they were asked to identify the key issues to consider in designing a multi-country, multi-language early grade literacy assessment protocol. The workshop, co-hosted by USAID, The World Bank, and RTI, included more than a dozen experts from a diverse group of countries, as well as some 14 observers from institutions such as USAID, the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, George Washington University, the South Africa Ministry of Education and Plan International, among others. A detailed list of participants, including expert bios and contact information can be found in the Appendix, along with a sample invitation, workshop agenda and Round Table discussion questions.

POLICY BRIEF: Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)

This presentation, given at the CIES 2023 Annual Conference, highlights the global shift in measurement and improvement in learning outcomes since the adoption of SDG 4.1.1, under which countries are asked to report on the “the proportion of children and young people…achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics”. Building on these results, the World Bank and UIS estimate that eighty percent of children in poor countries cannot read a simple sentence by the end of primary school. In reviewing the results of multiple regional and systems-level learning improvement programs to better understand the distribution of learning outcomes and system-level impact we find that: 1) while some progress has been made, the massive changes required to move the needle on the share of children reaching minimum proficiency remains elusive and 2) a small share of schools account for the majority of the gains. Finally, the panelist will create a link between this challenge and the theme of the panel; that education change will only be successful if work is undertaken to better understand and diminish the restraining forces of mindsets and education system social norms.

The El Salvador Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) was conducted in 2018 in late June and early July 2018 (toward the end of the El Salvador school year, which runs from January to October). The objective was to provide the Government of El Salvador with information on the reading performance of public school students in second and third grades. The sample was designed to represent government schools at the national level with a minimum enrollment of six students in each of the second and third grades and all of the second and third grade students in these grades. EGRA is an individually administered oral assessment of foundational reading skills; in Spanish, the skills tested include letter sound identification, familiar word reading, and oral reading fluency, among others. Closing early learning deficits in contexts like El Salvador is critical to improving economic development. According to a World Bank review of the causes of dropout in Central America, skills gaps that are not corrected through additional support and remediation compound over time. Students with weak foundational skills are more likely to struggle and become disinterested as content becomes more complex. As students age, they also face rising direct and opportunity costs and increased risk of teenage pregnancy and violence. Together these factors are associated with higher levels of grade repetition and school dropout. Analyzing El Salvador household survey data, the same report indicated that 40% of youth who had left school cited lack of interest while 25% reported economic causes as the main reasons for dropping out of school. Among girls, personal reasons, including pregnancy and caring for younger siblings, are the highest reported cause at 32%. The EGRA results indicate that 49% of second graders and 40% of third graders are reading at or below a rate of one correct word per second. Students performing at this level for oral reading fluency are identified as “At Risk” for developing later reading difficulties, and potentially school failure. This means that additional remediation steps, such as intensive instruction and frequent progress monitoring, are needed to increase the chances that these students catch up with their peers. Early skills gaps are associated with higher levels of grade repetition and in contexts like El Salvador, where primary completion is not universal, school dropout. On nearly every component of the assessment, boys, students in rural schools, students from lower-income groups, and students with some form of self-reported disability all scored lower than their more advantaged peers. Income disparities were especially noteworthy: Students in the lowest income group were more than three times as likely to score zero on the oral reading fluency passage relative to students in the highest income group (20% versus 6%).

Access to books is key to learning to read and sustaining a love of reading. Yet many low- and middle-income countries struggle to provide their students with reading materials of sufficient quality and quantity. In this paper, we seek to capture the practices RTI has developed and refined since 2008, particularly in response to the challenges inherent in contexts with high linguistic diversity and low operational capacity for producing and distributing instructional materials. These practices constitute our approach to developing and producing instructional materials for early grade literacy. We also touch upon effective planning for printing and distribution procurement, but we do not consider the printing and distribution processes in depth in this paper. We expect this volume will be useful for donors, policymakers, and practitioners interested in improving access to cost-effective, high-quality teaching and learning materials for the early grades.

La Agencia de los Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID) decidió financiar este estudio para proporcionar información actual al Ministerio de Educación (MINED) y al Gobierno El Salvador sobre el desempeño en lectura de los estudiantes de segundo y tercer grado a nivel nacional y, específicamente, en las escuelas ubicadas en los municipios del Plan El Salvador Seguro (PESS). PESS es un plan nacional para ayudar a 50 municipios cuyos índices de violencia y delincuencia son altos. La vinculación entre educación (tanto matricula como aprendizaje) y la violencia es una de las razones clave por la cual tanto el MINED como USAID quieren obtener más información sobre el estado de las habilidades lectoras en los grados iniciales. El MINED destacó su compromiso en mejorar la lectura cuando se inauguró el año escolar 2018 con una promesa de terminar con el analfabetismo. Para entender el desempeño en lectura de los grados iniciales, USAID solicitó a RTI que efectuara el presente estudio utilizando la Evaluación de Lectura Inicial (EGRA, por sus siglas en ingles), un instrumento adaptado y validado en más que 70 países. EGRA mide las habilidades básicas para poder leer con fluidez y con comprensión, que es el objetivo final de la lectura.

This annotated bibliography, originally created as a supplement to a research poster, compiles the output from an RTI internal research and development (IR&D) award. Each fiscal year, RTI considers staff-submitted proposals for innovative products or services that would advance a field of research but are not likely to be covered by external sources, and selects some to receive IR&D grants. Beginning in 2016, staff of RTI’s International Education division took on the challenge of significantly increasing the unit’s internal funding, production, and publication of peer-reviewed research. The urgency was driven by three significant factors: (1) Omission from meta-analyses—During the previous 10 year period, several broadly distributed retrospectives were published on “what works” in learning assessment and improvement—none of which covered RTI’s extensive experience, because it was available only as gray literature (primarily reports for the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID). Thus, a decade of learning from the administration and analysis of Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Assessments (EGRA and EGMA), in particular, was not well accounted for. (2) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—In 2015, the global community adopted the SDGs and began determining metrics to monitor progress. Unless RTI moved to publish its findings on potential use of alternative assessments, including EGRA and EGMA, country-driven approaches to measurement for low- and lower-middle-income countries could be excluded from options for monitoring and tracking progress toward the new global goals. (3) Absence of external funding—The primary sponsor of the relevant project work, USAID, did not have funding to support following up with additional analyses, particularly those involving multicountry comparisons. The IR&D award responded to these gaps. As led by Dr. Amber Gove, the primary intent of the effort was to ensure that the Institute would lead the field in using and disseminating EGRA and EGMA data, the majority of which RTI had collected and analyzed. The IR&D funding covered multiple years, and the result by late 2019 was 16 peer-reviewed publications, with several more submitted and under review. Some key lessons learned during the process—as reflected in the listed works—were: (1) Start with client-funded reports and analyses; (2) pair first-time authors with more experienced writers; (3) ask key questions across countries and/or languages; (4) collaborate with colleagues from other organizations; and (5) prioritize broad (open) access. More information: Amber Gove, e-mail: agove@rti.org; Twitter: @AmberGove

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Amber Gove and Helen Jang. The Early Grade Reading Barometer offers a wealth of actionable Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) data to help to change the lives of young children. With 40 datasets from 19 places, the Barometer supports data transparency. The Barometer is designed for USAID education officers, policy makers, education staff in host countries, implementation partners, education researchers, and practitioners. It is designed primarily for users who may have limited knowledge about early grade reading, and no or little sophisticated statistical knowledge. This presentation was an interactive demonstration of the Barometer, highlighting the vast amount of data available to the public and how the information can be used to improve learning outcomes.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Amber Gove. With few exceptions (Aboud & Hossain, 2011; Gertler et al., 2013), much of the published research on the impact of preprimary participation stems from high-income countries (Campbell et al., 2014; Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz, 2010). Few studies have examined preschool and later learning across multiple countries (Raikes, Devercelli, & Kutaka, 2015). This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining the relationship between preprimary participation and early primary reading outcomes, as measured by Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) (Dubeck & Gove, 2015; RTI International, 2016). Drawing on a unique set of data using student-level learning assessments from sixteen low and middle income countries, we use preprimary participation to explain primary reading outcomes.