Peek Acuity and hearScreen® are mobile, electronic screening tools that provide data on vision and hearing impairments. The tools were designed to be administered in schools and classrooms so that teachers and schools can better accommodate visually- or hearing-impaired students to increase their opportunities of succeeding in school.

Presentation by Carmen Strigel, Director, Technology for Education and Training, RTI International. Delivered at the RTI Panel Discussion "Vision and Hearing Screening in LMICs: Challenges and Opportunities" held Wed, September 26, 2018 in Washington, D.C. For related resources, see also the topic "Assessments" using the "by Topic" link in the menu above.

Interest inmeasuring executive function skills in young children in lowand middle-income country contexts has been stymied by the lack of assessments that are both easy to deploy and scalable. This study reports on an initial effort to develop a tablet-based battery of executive function tasks, which were designed and extensively studied in the United States, for use in Kenya. Participants were 193 children, aged 3–6 years old, who attended early childhood development and education centers. The rates of individual task completion were high (65–100%), and 85% of children completed three or more tasks. Assessors indicated that 90% of all task administrations were of acceptable quality. An executive function composite score was approximately normally distributed, despite higher-than-expected floor and ceiling effects on inhibitory control tasks. Children’s simple reaction time (β = –0.20, p = .004), attention-related behaviors during testing (β = 0.24, p = .0005), and age (β = –0.24, p = .0009) were all uniquely related to performance on the executive function composite. Results are discussed as they inform efforts to develop valid and reliable measures of executive function skills among young children in developing country contexts.

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.

This presentation was prepared for UNESCO Mobile Learning Week, 2018. It describes an RTI International internal research program to learn whether mobile gaming can be used to assess soft skills important for employability. The presentation was created by Lee Nordstrum and delivered by Sarah Pouezevara.

Executive Function (EF) refers to a range of cognitive skills that are key to problem solving and a child's ability to “learn how to learn.” These skills experience an important growth period during early childhood; thus, between 2005 and 2010, researches at the University of North Carolina designed a battery of tools to measure these skills in pre-school aged children known as EF Touch. In 2016, RTI International – a research institute dedicated to evidence-based approaches to education policy and practice - identified EF Touch as a unique opportunity to integrate early childhood EF measurement in its battery of existing international education assessment tools. EF Touch was originally developed by UNC in note card format; then adapted to a paper and pencil format; and later transitioned to laptop and touch-screen monitor “station” requiring two assessors and an expensive third party scoring software. Although the laptop mediated approach was an improvement on paper-based administration, it was still clear that this model was not sustainable, portable, or cost effective for large deployment in the low and middle income (LMIC) contexts where RTI most often works – and where very little research on EFs in young children has been thus far conducted). Therefore, RTI sought to adapt Tangerine® - an open source software designed by RTI for low cost, large-scale, offline assessment – for use in the administration of EF Touch. More than 60 organizations worldwide have used Tangerine on tablets to conduct 1,500,000+ surveys in 70 countries and 100 languages. To accommodate the specific requirements of EF Touch, the Tangerine platform needed extensive modification to accommodate the specific needs of EF touch, including new A/V capabilities, unique millisecond time-stamps indicating reaction time, plus the development of complex skip logic commands tailored to individual performance. The resulting Tangerine-mediated battery of EF Touch tasks were designed to remain scientifically rigorous while significantly reducing costs (one assessor, one tablet); increasing scalability in developing country contexts (offline assessment); and reducing the burden of complicated data entry (data uploaded directly to the server). This presentation provides an overview of EF touch, including the adaptation process to Tangerine and recent results from two field deployments in Kenya. The attached presentation does not contain video files to due the attachment size. The full presentation with videos of task demonstrations can be found via the included google drive link.

Tangerine overview in Spanish

Background paper prepared for the 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report Education for people and planet: Creating sustainable futures for all With the adoption of the United Nations General Assembly’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global education agencies are grappling with how quality can and should be measured for global reporting purposes. Several factors at the education system, school, and classroom levels shape education quality, including the limited information available at the global level about what is happening in the classroom. Such information can only come through observation-based measures that record teacher practices, either through routine monitoring conducted by system actors or through surveys. Classroom observation is used extensively in not only teacher education and professional development, but also in evaluation studies. However, there are fewer cases where classroom observations are used for system monitoring purposes—particularly in low- and middle- income countries. This paper reviews what has been learned from observation instruments in low- and middle-income countries and what opportunities (i.e., scope) there are to systematize these countries to that they can monitor quality at both the school and system levels.

This case study was selected by the Digital Principles for Development as a model illustrating the principles of "design with the user in mind" and "be data driven".

Article published in the IJEDICT, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2017). Published Abstract: "Previous large-scale education technology interventions have shown only modest impacts on student achievement. Building on results from an earlier randomized controlled trial of three different applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on primary education in Kenya, the Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity developed the National Tablets Program. The National Tablets Program is integrated into the Tusome activity by providing tablets to each of more than 1,200 instructional coaches in the country to use when they visit teachers. This enables a national database of classroom instructional quality, which is used by the education system to monitor overall education quality. The tools provided on the tablets are designed to help coaches increase the quality of their instructional support to teachers, and deepen the shallow accountability structures in Kenya’s education system. Using results of a national survey, we investigated the ability of the National Tablets Program to increase the number of classroom observations done by coaches and to improve student learning outcomes. Survey results showed high levels of tablet program utilization, increased accountability, and improvements in learning outcomes. We share recommendations regarding large-scale ICT interventions and literacy programs.