A teacher's guide for mathematics instruction in the context of Jordan, developed by the Jordanian Ministry of Education.

This report summarizes the findings of an effort to develop and validate tablet-based, self-administered assessments of English-language foundational literacy and numeracy in the early grades. The tools described in the report were developed at the request of Imagine Worldwide with the support of the Jacobs Foundation. RTI carried out field testing and a pilot study to assess the tools' internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and concurrent validity with respect to "traditional" EGRA and EGMA. RTI International developed the two assessments, known respectively as the Self-Administered Early Grade Reading Assessment (SA-EGRA) and the Self-Administered Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (SA-EGMA), with the support and at the direction of Imagine Worldwide. The assessments are deemed “self-administered,” because children complete the assessments independently in response to instructions and stimuli imbedded in the tablet-based software. However, adults typically supervise the organization and conduct of the assessment as well as the collection of individual data from the tablets for analysis. The tools have been developed under an open-source license. The code can be viewed and downloaded for reuse or modification at https://github.com/ICTatRTI/SE-tools/blob/main/README.md. Users of RTI's Tangerine software may request that the SA-EGRA and SA-EGMA tools be added to their Tangerine groups via https://www.tangerinecentral.org/contact

The Play Accelerator research partner grant presents a unique opportunity to examine five large-scale educational interventions focused on improving learning through play (in Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Vietnam, respectively). One aspect of this activity is determining if and how these five programs change the practice and attitudes of key education stakeholder and whether or not this leads to improved holistic learning outcomes through increasing playful pedagogies. This, in turn, will generate much-needed rigorous evidence on implementing playful pedagogies successfully through government teacher professional development systems at scale. Due to prolonged school closures and other obstacles resulting from COVID-19, this report presents baseline findings collected between June and November 2021 from three of the five Play Accelerator partner programs: Partners in Play Program (P3) implemented by Right to Play in Ghana; Tucheza Kujifunza (TuKu) implemented by Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) in Kenya; and the Scaling Learning Through Play program implemented by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Rwanda. The goal of this report is to provide comprehensive baseline estimates for these three Learning through Play (LtP) programs. These results will serve two purposes: 1) to provide a starting point against which program impact will be measured at midline and endline, and 2) to provide programs with data-driven recommendations of areas to focus on for improved implementation throughout the remainder of their programming. While the overall evaluation of these programs includes a wide range of research questions that will be addressed at midline and endline, the baseline study focuses specifically on four main research questions: 1. What are the baseline levels of student literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning among Grade 1 students in treatment and control schools? 2. What is the baseline state of teachers’ pedagogical practices in the classroom (including LtP) among Grade 1 teachers in treatment and control schools? 3. What are the baseline perceptions of LtP among school-, district-, and community-level stakeholders? 4. What are the enabling factors associated with implementing LtP pedagogical methods in classrooms? What are the barriers associated with implementing LtP pedagogical methods in classrooms?

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.

A Student Activity Book for grade 1 students in Liberia.

This publication covers topic such as reading and arts.

This final report describes the progress made from October 1, 2015 - December 31, 2018 under the Tanzania National Early Grade Reading Assessment activity. USAID/Tanzania contracted RTI International to conduct two rounds of student assessments in early grade reading.

This report presents the findings of the Jordan Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Initiative (RAMP) endline survey conducted at the end of the 2018–2019 school year (in May 2019).

This document is intended for program and curriculum experts interested in implementing evidence-based early grade mathematics programs. It was developed by the authors of this document, who are mathematics teaching and learning experts with extensive experience adapting evidence-based practices in low and middle-income contexts. Our collective field and research experience, combined with the existing evidence base, led us to focus on four instructional strategies that are key to effective mathematics instruction: 1. Respecting developmental progressions 2. Using mathematical models to represent abstract notions 3. Encouraging children to explain and justify their thinking 4. Making explicit connections for children between formal and informal math While these four instructional strategies are very important, they are not the only instructional strategies that can result in improved learning outcomes. Effective early grade mathematics teachers draw from an extensive repertoire of evidence-based instructional strategies and strive to create a learning environment the supports that development of positive mathematical identities.

La Evaluación de Matemáticas en los Primeros Grados (EGMA) Toolkit