The Uzbekistan Ministry of Preschool and School Education (MoPSE) has embarked upon an ambitious reform agenda to bring the Uzbek public education system in line with twenty-first century international standards and skills. This agenda is enshrined in several presidential decrees.1 The reform agenda includes numerous initiatives, including developing a new national curriculum framework and a laser focus on increasing information and communication technology and English as a foreign language skills through the IT Nation and English-Speaking Nation initiatives. Reform efforts also include participating for the first time in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in 2021 and in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2022 (PISA). MoPSE has committed to reaching a PIRLS ranking of 30 or higher by 2030, but reform takes time and challenges persist. At the onset of the Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program (UEEP), the teaching culture in many schools in Uzbekistan was still quite teacher-centric, with only a modicum of observable student-centered instructional strategies promoting critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. Basic reading and mathematics scores were within the international mean, but students struggled with reading comprehension and more complex mathematics.

The Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program (the Program), funded by the United States Agency for International Development, designed the Uzbek Language Arts (ULA) and Mathematics Teaching and Learning Material (TLM) Uptake Study to learn whether and how teachers and students in grades 2 and 4 are using the new teacher guides (TGs) and student textbooks (STBs). The Program used Phase 1 results and ensuing recommendations to inform the development and finalization of materials and ongoing teacher professional development (TPD) efforts. Phase 2 results served to determine whether teachers became more proficient over time in their application of the Student-Centered Strategies (SCSs) embedded in the TGs and STBs.

The Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program (the Program), funded by the United States Agency for International Development, designed the Uzbek Language Arts (ULA) and Mathematics Teaching and Learning Material (TLM) Uptake Study to learn whether and how teachers and students in grades 2 and 4 are using the new materials. The Program used the Phase 1 results and ensuing recommendations to inform the development and finalization of materials and ongoing teacher professional development (TPD) efforts.

The information and communication technology (ICT) baseline assessment measured current competency of grades 9, 10, and 11 students on the Program-developed materials that include standards, teacher guides, and use of the ICT student textbooks (STB). The Program customized the STB for Uzbekistan from an internationally sourced series of ICT materials originating from Cambridge University Press. The assessment was conducted with students across these three grades in two distinct regions (Namangan and Sirdaryo) of Uzbekistan.

To evaluate the impact of the Program’s reading and mathematics components, baseline Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Assessments (EGRA and EGMA, respectively) were conducted in November and December 2021. Overall, 1,623 grade 3 and 1,629 grade 5 students from 140 Program schools participated in the EGRA/EGMA baseline. Their performance will be compared over time as these schools receive reading and mathematics interventions for the first time. The EGRA/EGMA baseline was originally planned to assess students completing grades 2 and 4 at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, in May 2020. However, the assessment was postponed because of COVID-19. A decision was made to assess grades 3 and 5 students at the beginning of the school year in November–December 2021, as proxies for students completing grades 2 and 4.

To evaluate the impact of the Program’s reading and mathematics components on student learning, this report will compare results from the endline assessment against the values from the baseline assessment. The baseline Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Assessments (EGRA and EGMA, respectively) were conducted in November and December 2021. The endline was administered in May 2023.

The goal of this study was to learn whether and how teachers in grades 2 and 4 were using the new ULA and Mathematics TG and STBs and applying the SCSs therein. The study consisted of two phases. The Program used Phase 1 results and ensuing recommendations to inform the development and finalization of materials and ongoing TPD efforts. Phase 2 results served to determine whether teachers became more proficient over time in their application of the SCSs embedded in the TGs.

This information and communication technology (ICT) assessment measured the competency of 1,244 grade 9, 10, and 11 students from the beginning to the end of the 2022–2023 school year in two regions. This longitudinal study measured the impact of student learning outcomes over the course of a year. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program conducted a baseline assessment at the beginning of the school year in September 2022 and an endline assessment at the end of the school year in May 2023. These assessments included a knowledge examination of the content of newly introduced ICT standards and textbooks. The examination was based on standards and proficiency was defined as 78%, 79%, and 77% correct responses in the assessment for grades 9, 10, and 11 respectively by the subject matter specialists in ICT. Additionally, to better measure the progress during the early years of implementation of the new curriculum, the Program also set intermediate proficiency levels at 50%, 40%, and 40% for grades 9, 10, and 11 respectively.