The purpose of this formal group panel session is to share and discuss the experience in the Philippines of adapting the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) for students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. This was conducted in two phases. First, under the USAID-funded Gabay project the traditional EGRA was adapted and piloted for students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. The resulting instrument was then used to conduct a baseline assessment in March 2020. Subsequently, in 2022 USAID tasked the All Children Reading Asia (ACR-Asia) project to develop a prototype of the assessment which could be administered remotely to students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing when it is not possible to send trained assessors to physically conduct the assessment in person. This panel will discuss the challenges, successes, and lessons learned through the process and provide recommendations on how other countries or projects could build upon the experience in the Philippines. In 2022, the USAID-Philippines Mission tasked the ACR-Asia project (2016-2023; implemented by RTI International) to develop a prototype EGRA instrument that can be conducted remotely for students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. The school closures and travel restrictions imposed under the COVID-19 pandemic created major challenges in reaching all students, including students with disabilities. In addition, the context of the Philippines which experiences frequent adverse weather and geological situations – like typhoons, flooding, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes – coupled with a geography of thousands of islands and hard to reach areas, makes it difficult to conduct on-site and in-person activities in general. Therefore, a remotely administered assessment would help to address these challenges in reaching students, especially those with disabilities, for assessment and support. This panel will address the following: • Addressing the needs of the Philippines for assessing and reaching students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing • Considerations in adapting the traditional EGRA for students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing • The process of adapting and piloting an EGRA for students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing • Prototyping a remote version of the adapted instrument, including the technological and procedural challenges to address • Lessons learned and recommendations for similar adaptations

USAID’s All Children Reading–Cambodia (ACR) project seeks to improve the EGR abilities of children in preschool to Grade 2 ACR proposes to achieve its goals by developing, testing, and implementing a rigorous, practical, and scalable intervention in Khmer language for this student population in at least two provinces. These provinces currently include Kampong Thom and Kampot. In 2018, RTI received additional funding from USAID under the All Children Learning award to expand the integration of inclusive education principles into the existing EGR programming. Using this additional funding, ACR worked on the development and piloting of an adapted Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) for students using braille and sign language. This presentation will discuss the lessons learned from the ACR adapted EGRA pilot and other EGRA adaptations in developing nations for learners using braille or sign language. It will do so from the lens of data collection methods, data analysis, instrument pilot analysis, and analysis of instrument reliability and validity. Adapting an EGRA to suit these needs is drastically different to adapting an EGRA for a new spoken and written language, as language acquisition for these populations don’t follow the same underlying assumptions included in the foundation of early EGRA development. This presentation will discuss the challenges faced in adapting EGRAs for these learners, current thinking on best practices for measuring language acquisition and literacy rates, and strategies for avoiding common pitfalls other programs have fallen prey to.

Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRAs) measure students’ progress in reading through individual administration of an oral survey of foundational reading skills. Administration is generally conducted on-site by teams of trainer assessors, face to face with students in a one-on-one capacity. While EGRAs are administered internationally, students who are deaf or hard of hearing are often left at a disadvantage by prevailing reading assessments. To adapt EGRAs to fit the needs of students who are deaf or hard of hearing, USAID has supported the development of EGRAs specifically for students who are deaf or hard of hearing in Kenya, Morocco, Nepal, and the Philippines, among other countries. In the Philippines, these assessments have improved the understanding of and capability in inclusive education programming, including the development and pilot implementation of the Filipino Sign Language (FSL) curriculum and training and mentoring of teachers in FSL. As there is no information on existing models of remotely administered EGRAs, the purpose of this activity was to prototype—design, develop, and test for proof of concept and acceptability—an early grade reading assessment that is administered asynchronously with assessors and enumerators who are not on-site, for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Such a model can be deployed in outbreaks and emergencies that affect the ability to administer EGRAs in person and at a specified period and specifically adapted for students who are deaf or hard of hearing.

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

This brief highlights data from Read Liberia's external impact evaluation conducted by NORC

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?

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.

An Instructional guide for 2 teachers in Liberia.

An instructional guide for grade 2 teachers in Liberia.

Let's Read is a grade 2 learning resource for teachers in Liberia.