Students’ experiences of school life play an important role in their ability to benefit from their education. When children feel safe and welcome at school, are encouraged in the classroom and have the confidence to seek assistance when challenged socially or academically, they will be in a good position to reach their potential. Unfortunately, many schools around the world are not positive or encouraging. Bullying, corporal punishment, sexual harassment and assault are the norm. Until recently, the measurement tools to assess many of the non-cognitive factors that mediate learning have not existed for the international education context. Since 2014, RTI has been working to fill these gaps and has developed valid and reliable instruments for measuring school climate and culture, gender norms, social and emotional learning competencies and school related gender-based violence (SRGBV) in low- and middle-income countries.

Quality inclusive education for children with disabilities is now a requirement in development work. However, many governments struggle not only with how to strengthen and adapt instruction to meet the needs of children with disabilities, but also in assessing what those needs are. This is particularly true for children who are blind or have profoundly low vision and those who are deaf or profoundly hard of hearing. Under USAID funding, and drawing upon ground-breaking work conducted by USAID, Perkins International, and School to School, RTI has developed early braille and sign language assessments and used them to establish a national baseline of proficiency in these languages in Kenya.

GALA is an assessment tool for measuring early literacy skills in a group setting. It consists of two main components: student booklets with multiple choice questions and a tool providing assessors with a complete protocol for test administration.

Tangerine:Class is easy-to-use software that assists teachers to systematically collect, analyze, and use students’ results from continuous curriculum-based assessments to inform instructional decisions on grouping, pacing, and materials use. It is optimized for Android devices and offline use.

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Indonesia 2014: The National Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Snapshot of School Management Effectiveness (SSME) Survey Instruments

Through the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Research Triangle Institute (RTI) is implementing the Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Initiative (RAMP) (2015–2019). The objective of RAMP is to improve the reading and mathematics skills of students in Jordan from Kindergarten 2 through grade 3 (K2–G3). The inclusion of students with disabilities is a crosscutting theme of this project. To address this theme, RTI engaged a team of international and local experts in special and inclusive education to conduct a situational assessment on the education of students with disabilities in Jordan. The assessment took place between December 2016 to May 2017. Findings from this assessment will help to compare the current situation in Jordan with international standards and best practices, determine gaps in services, strengthen RAMP’s inclusion efforts, and further enhance future efforts and initiatives conducted by the Ministry of Education (MoE).

This report, from the All Children Reading-Cambodia project, documents the results of the teacher survey, desk review and compilation of assessment data and communicates the implications of that research in the form of recommended updates to the syllabus, curriculum and materials for grades 1-2

This is a list of select peer-reviewed publications by International Education staff between 2015 and 2018. For some of the publications, links to information about the documents and related resources can be found on this websiate. Where possible, the DOI has been included in the attached brief.

Under the USAID Partnership for Education: Testing activity, a teacher questionnaire was introduced to the 2015 national EGRA/EGMA survey in Ghana. This was in response to the 2013 EGRA/EGMA pupil data, which raised questions about how both pupils and their teachers experienced the language of instruction (LOI) policy, which stipulates that pupils should be taught in the Ghanaian language of the local area in the early grades and transition to English by P4. In an effort to learn more about how the LOI policy is implemented in schools, this teacher questionnaire was added in 2015 to collect more information about teacher preparation and instructional practices related to language use. The questionnaire was administered to 671 P2 teachers.