Most of the research that informs our understanding of children’s social-emotional learning (SEL) comes from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies where behavior is guided by a view of the self as autonomous, acting on individual preferences. In the subsistence agricultural communities (home to more than a quarter of the world’s population), obligations and communal goals override personal preferences and individuals see themselves as part of a social hierarchy. These contrasting models of the self have profound implications for SEL. Many studies underestimate these implications because they use assessment tools developed in WEIRD settings to understand SEL in lower- and middle-income countries. The aim of our study was to build an SEL assessment from the ground up, based on community definitions of valued competencies in southern Tanzania. In Study 1, Qualitative data from parents and teachers indicated that dimensions of social responsibility, such as obedience and respect, were valued highly. Teachers valued curiosity and self-direction more than parents, as competencies required for success in school. Quantitative assessments in Study 2 found that individuals more exposed to sociodemographic variables associated with WEIRD settings (urban residence and higher parental education and SES) were more curious, less obedient and had poorer emotional regulation. Overall findings suggest that the conceptualization of social-emotional competencies may differ between and within societies; commonly held assumptions of universality are not supported. Based on the findings of this study we propose a systematic approach to cultural adaptation of assessments. The approach does not rely solely on local participants to vet and adapt items but is instead guided by a rigorous cultural analysis. Such an analysis, we argue, requires us to put aside assumptions about behavioral development and to consider culture as a system with an origin and function. Such an approach has the potential to identify domains of SEL that are absent from commonly used frameworks and to uncover other domains that are conceptualised differently across contexts. In so doing, we can create SEL assessments and SEL programs that are genuinely relevant to the needs of participants.

Due to increasing rates of COVID19 infection in Cambodia, primary schools were closed from March 2021 through the end of the school year. In Kampong Thom, Kampot, and Kep, the USAID-funded and RTI-implemented All Children Reading-Cambodia project rolled out comprehensive activities to support learning at home. While these interventions were implemented successfully, students had still missed nearly an entire year of explicit reading instruction. When schools reopened, they, and their teachers, would need intensive and targeted support to help make up for lost learning and to sustain gains under the National Early Grades Reading Program, Komar Rien Komar Cheh. To help inform this support, All Children Reading conducted a “temperature check” study with the aim of understanding teachers’ current status, well-being, concerns, capacity gaps, and plans for reading instruction when schools reopen; as well as measurement of students’ levels of reading proficiency, vis a vis where they are expected to be reading according to the curriculum. This study sought to better understand teacher’s perceptions around returning to school after prolonged closures, and how they plan to support students, in order to strategically target support that is both in line with best practice and responsive to where teachers are. A purposeful sample of 100 schools was drawn from two provinces, Kampong Thom (50 schools) and Kampot (50 schools). Schools were randomly sampled, proportional to each district. Data will be presented from 200 phone-based interviews conducted with grade 1 and 2 teachers, 100 in-person school director interviews, and 1,600 levelled student assessments conducted with grade 1 (800) and grade 2 (800) students. Findings are presented on the following: •Teachers’ levels of confidence returning to school and implementing the national Komar Rien Komar Cheh reading package, and specific areas where they still struggle •Teachers’ concerns and priorities for students’ learning in the coming year •Teachers’ plans to help students catch-up on missed content and skills, vis a vis their approach to curriculum coverage •Students’ reading levels in grade 1 and grade 2 at the end of a protracted school closure for most of the year, relative to where they should be per the curriculum

The All Children Reading–Asia (ACR–Asia) Return to Learning Cambodia Case Study was designed to research the Cambodia Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport’s (MoEYS’s) response to the disruption in learning created by the COVID-19 pandemic during different phases of school closure and reopening in the 2019–2020 and 2021 school years. The study used qualitative interview methods to study the education system’s response, from the central ministry level down, to how school directors and teachers implemented expectations communicated to them. Forty-four participants were interviewed, including central MoEYS personnel, school directors, teachers, and caregivers. Participants were asked about the phases of MoEYS response to the pandemic and what procedures, implementations, and subsequent outcomes occurred The presenter will present findings that positive changes were implemented in the participating schools. Many stakeholders within the education system and its stakeholders act and react to an education crisis in ways that would not be typical of the system functions and individual behaviors experienced in a regular school year. Fundamentally, the education system and its actors showed that during COVID-19, they could carry out a set of core functions (RTI International, 2018). These core systems functions were to set and communicate expectations, monitor progress, provide targeted support to facilitate students’ access to continued education during school closures, and make stakeholders accountable for meeting the expectations.

The CRLA was initially conceived as a 5-minute start-up reading assessment designed to help teachers quickly determine the reading profiles of their G1-G3 learners, and develop appropriate reading instructional strategies. The main goal is to identify children who need additional support in reading. The CRLA was developed in response to the extended break that learners experienced over the summer of 2020 due to the pandemic. After 32 weeks of no class, teachers needed a rapid, easy to use tool, to determine what level of readiness and support the returning children needed. The beginning of school year tasks focused on letter sounds, isolated words and sentence in reading in MT (G1), Filipino (G1-G2) and English (G1-G3). In the Philippines, learners are expected to transition from their mother tongue (MT) to Filipino and English (L2 and L3 respectively) by grade 4. However, the earliest standardized assessment used in the Philippines is for Filipino starting in G3 and English starting in G4. Prior to the CRLA, there were no existing standardized tools or systems used to assess in the MT. It was also a tool that could be administered remotely (online or even over the phone) which proved critical for schooling in the new normal where face to face classes were not permitted. Thus, the CRLA met the needs of teachers who were missing such a tool in their early grade assessment toolbox. The CRLA was initially piloted in November 2020 with select schools. The experience of the pilot led DepEd to scale up the CRLA to all schools in the ABC+ Target Regions. The feedback from the schools and teachers who utilized the CRLA was encouraging. Many schools used the results of the CRLA to develop remedial and focused reading programs in the context of the new normal and identify the struggling readers to provide additional support. Based on the success of the beginning of school year RLA, the Department of Education requested ABC+ to help develop middle and end of year assessments that would align to their curricular competencies. Keeping to the same criteria (rapid and easy to administer and analyze), the team incorporated listening comprehension, oral reading fluency and reading comprehension tasks for end of year administration. At the request of DepEd, ABC+ is currently in the process of expanding the number of MT languages supported by the CRLA and incorporating it into their operations manual for mother tongue-based multi-lingual education.

Policy linking is a standard-setting methodology, long used in many countries, to set benchmarks (or cut scores) on learning assessments that allow those countries to determine what percentage of students in their country are meeting minimum proficiency requirements for key skills such as reading and math. While it is an old standard-setting methodology, its use has been extended to help countries set benchmarks that will allow reporting against global standards. Policy linking allows countries to use their existing national and/or regional assessments to report against Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.1.1: “Proportion of children and young people in Grade 2 or 3 (4.1.1a), at the end of primary education (4.1.1b), and at the end of lower secondary education (4.1.1c) who achieve at least a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics.” It works by linking assessments to the Global Proficiency Framework (GPF), a framework developed by global reading and math content experts based on current national content and assessment frameworks across more than 25 countries. The GPF provides performance expectations/ standards for learners in Grades 1-9 in reading and mathematics. By linking existing national and regional assessments to the GPF, countries and donors are able to compare learning outcomes across language groups in countries as well as across countries and over time, assuming all new assessments are subsequently linked to the GPF. In this roundtable, we will share learning from policy linking work that has taken place this past year. Following a brief introduction to Policy Linking for Measuring Global Learning Outcomes by Dr. Saima Malik, from USAID in Washington DC, Dr. Asumpta Matei from the Kenya National Examinations Council and Dr. Enos Radeny of USAID Kenya will present the model of a Policy Linking workshop that was designed and implemented in order to build ministry capacity as well as set benchmarks for grades 2 and 3 in English and Kiswahili in Kenya, Dr. Abdullah Ferdous and Dr. Jeff Davis of AIR (co-developers of the policy linking approach) will discuss the importance of feedback in establishing defensible global benchmarks during the policy linking process and Dr. Jodie Fonseca from RTI will share practical example from Nepal where policy linking was used to align the national assessment to the Global Proficiency Framework and proved to be a more cost-effective way to measure early grade reading outcomes than an EGRA. Melissa Chiappetta of Sage Perspectives will serve as discussant of the panel.

This presentation was part of a CIES 2022 panel on measuring learning through play and child SEL outcomes across humanitarian and LMIC contexts. The presentation focuses primarily on the development of a new SEL tool that is being used as part of impact evaluations for five learning through play implementation programs across five countries.

Prior Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRA) have been used to set reading fluency benchmarks in Tanzania for USAID report and for the Government of Tanzania (GoT). Since the EGRA requires one-on-one administration with trained enumerators, tablets, it is currently too expensive to be sustainable within the government system. The Group Administered Literacy Assessment (GALA) is an inexpensive and sustainable way to collect information about students’ reading abilities; is it group administered, does not require intensive training to administer, and is collected on paper, which is then entered into a database. Unfortunately, the GALA does not contain a fluency measure, which is still used as the basis of USAID reporting. The Jifunze Uelewe team created a study in order to identify the reading fluency equivalent benchmarks for the GALA on a subsample of the total GALA respondents. The study is administering the both the EGRA’s reading passage and the GALA to a sample of grade 2 and grade 4 pupils attending public schools in Tanzania. Data collection occurred in October 2021. Data collection was happening during the submission of this abstract, so no results are available for the abstract. But we will report the results and will discuss how well the linking process worked.

Play has the potential to transform the global learning crisis. In infancy and early childhood, play builds a strong foundation for later learning by improving brain development and growth (Goldstein, 2012). In education systems that lack capacity to support children effectively, play brings its own powerful engine to drive learning—the joyful, engaged intrinsic motivation of children themselves (Zosh et al., 2017). In this way, play contributes to the holistic development of children, helping to prepare them for the challenges of the current and future world. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to improve measurement of playful learning, to be able to add to the evidence base on what the benefits of play are, how playful learning takes place, and how it can be promoted at home and at school across the lifespan. This presentation focuses on a renewed conceptualization of playful learning and describes an innovative approach to measuring how settings contribute to playful learning for children ages 0 to 12, supported by the Lego Foundation. The settings we examine include homes, classrooms and ECD centers. Following Tseng and Seideman (2007), we view settings as consisting of social interactions (i.e. between teachers or caregivers and children) and the organization of resources (e.g. learning materials, games). First, we will present our conceptual framework which identifies six constructs to guide our measurement strategy. The constructs, such as ‘support for exploration’, represent the ways in which a setting supports playful learning. Next, we will present our contextualization framework which guides how we are adapting and modifying the measurement tools to different contexts. The tool consists of a protocol to observe adult-child interactions and survey measures conducted with teachers, caregivers and primary school pupils. As part of the development process for these measurement tools, observation and survey measures will go through a three-phase development process in Kenya, Ghana, Colombia, and Jordan. The Build phase involved collecting qualitative data from teachers, caregivers and students to understand their perception of playful learning and how it is supported at home and at school. Next, an Adapt phase took place where the initial versions of the measurement tools underwent cognitive interviewing, field adaptation, and a small pilot to adjust and extend the items in the tool. The third Test phase is a full pilot of the instruments, and the data will undergo rigorous psychometric analyses to review the validity and reliability of the tools in the four country contexts. We will use the results to adjust the instruments and to finalize the conceptual framework and contextualization strategies. The final toolkit will be publicly available towards the end of 2022 with supporting materials for contextualization, piloting, training and analysis. The toolkit will be available on a public platform designed to promote sharing of data collected using the tool and to collaborate to continually improve approaches to measuring support for playful learning.

On January 18, 2022, the USAID’s Bureau for Asia collaborated with RTI International to reflect on the journey of early grade reading around the globe. The first presenter, Rosalina J. Villaneza, gave an introduction of national-scale early grade literacy assessments in the Philippines. The second presenter, Pilar Robledo, discussed the advent of USAID early grade reading programs, using the EGR Barometer to explore the impact of these programs. The final presenter, Luis Crouch, reflected on research and experience of early grade reading programs, suggesting the next steps on this journey to improve early grade literacy worldwide. View the recording below.

This report describes findings and lessons learned from an online teacher training course in the Philippines. "Becoming a Learning Detective" is a 5-day online course that focuses on the design and use of formative assessment to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes in Kindergarten to Grade 3 (K–3) classrooms. The emphasis is on classroom-based assessment strategies that are embedded within daily teaching and learning experiences, involving an active partnership between teacher and students. The course brings together asynchronous and synchronous elements, as well as whole group, small group, and individual learning experiences. The course was implemented for the first time among a small cohort of participants across 17 regions in the Philippines. Findings and recommendations of this initial training are being applied toward strengthening the course prior to offering it at a larger scale in the Philippines.