This report presents the findings of research undertaken in the Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia. It forms part of a broader study that aims to explore the system and school-level practices that have supported learning continuity in Asia during the pandemic. The study will focus on the practices of policymakers that have supported teaching and learning and consider ways in which school leaders, teachers, and parents have worked to support children during periods of disruption. Rather than comparing the responses of countries in Asia, this study will highlight innovations in the system and school policies and programs in the Kyrgyz Republic and make recommendations based on insights from the Kyrgyz Republic’s education system. The study will focus on the system and school participants that support students in the Kyrgyz Republic but will not include students themselves.

This document provides a summary of research exploring the systems, policies, and school-level practices that have supported learning continuity in Asia during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a review of policy documents on COVID-19 responses in Asia and a deep dive analysis of system and school-level responses in the Philippines and the Kyrgyz Republic, the findings from this study provide policymakers and education stakeholders with evidence of promising practices that could be leveraged to support learning recovery and education system resilience. In addition, a policy review was conducted on the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), which focused on the practices of policymakers that have the potential to support teaching and learning. The study's intent is not to compare and contrast countries' responses but to highlight innovations in the system and school practices and make recommendations based on insights from system leaders and educators.

The changes in the labor market, the re-organization of work worldwide, the increasing pressure to improve economic competitiveness in a context of global inter-connectedness, less job security and stagnant or dropping standards of living alongside accelerating climate change have led many countries to rethink education. A common starting point is to consider the relevance of curricular content against this backdrop of complexity, with particular attention to social-emotional skills, competencies and flexibility. Curriculum is fundamental to teaching and learning processes. Its various components have wide-ranging consequences on the quality of education. Over time, a range of successful educational systems have prioritized competence-based curricula, learner-centered pedagogy, and continuous assessment. Other countries, including Kyrgyz Republic, are looking to learn from these ‘global education policies’ in order to update their educational systems. With a competence-based educational framework already in place, Kyrgyz Republic used this as the starting point for reform. A competence-based curriculum was introduced in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 in the form of a State Standard Framework. However, primary grade standards were not revised afterwards to align with the framework. As part of its Okuu Keremet! project (2019-2024), USAID supported the Ministry of Education and Science (MOES) to develop a Road Map that would outline the process for arriving at robust standards. The process would then be used to actually revise primary grade subject standards. This presentation will cover: 1. The government-led collaboration that took place to develop subject standards, including data analysis, the broad-ranging discussions in the working group and the involvement of practitioners. 2. The process of using a Road Map to arrive at the standards that were ultimately approved by MOES 3. The lessons learned with respect to fostering institutional capacity, creating an institutional memory for future reference, and cultivating government ownership. 4. Next steps: how the standards will be put in practice and monitored; the need to develop textbooks aligned with standards; orienting teacher education and in-service teacher training in line with the standards. During 2021-2022, MOES and Okuu Keremet – together with various multi-stakeholder technical groups – revised four primary subject standards: Mathematics, Kyrgyz and Russian Language and Reading, and “Me and the World” (basic science). The process followed the Road Map plan through four stages: 1) analysis of existing educational standards in the country and international trends; 2) review of primary level learning outcomes; 3) alignment with the country’s competence-based educational framework, and 4) consultation with diverse education experts and a community of specialists. The subject standards define the expected learning outcomes and how they relate to competencies. Subsequently, a curriculum map was formulated which depicts how these competencies will shape and prepare students for the real world, such as the job market and life skills. The Kyrgyz Academy of Education – responsible for standards among other things – organized a series of working meetings among a range of stakeholders to arrive at the first four subject standards. It then followed the overall Road Map to develop standards for the remaining six primary school subjects. All of the standards produced were approved in October 2022 and slated for implementation in the 2023-2024 academic year. One of the challenges that arose during the process was related to the lack of experience among the KAE experts in the analysis of assessment data. Understanding the outcome of learning assessment is necessary to setting a level of standards that is ambitious yet feasible for where students currently are in terms of learning per grade. Assessment results also enable KAE staff to understand international and national trends in a context where the country explicitly aims to perform better with respect to international assessments such as PISA. The formulation of measurable and achievable learning outcomes per grade was also a challenge. One of the important decisions made by the working group was to define expected outcomes at the end of the primary cycle. as a starting point. There was attention given to ensuring consistency in the transition from preschool to primary school and from primary to secondary school. Subject standards are only the starting point for changing the content of education. It needs to be accompanied by a range of key components that support the competences, such as appropriate teaching materials, the education of new teachers and the training of existing teachers, and the importance of both formative and summative assessment to know if learning outcomes are going in the desired direction. Moreover, the learning outcomes need to be made clear to communities of parents in every-day language so that they can support the process at home. So far, this has not been done in Kyrgyz Republic. As outlined in the Road Map, once standards are developed, a plan of implementation is needed, followed by assessment and, if necessary, adjustments. This cycle is expected to take a five years before the next round of review according the MOES regulation. CONCLUSIONS The collaboration of the KAE together with Okuu Keremet! and a spectrum of actors and individuals over the past three years to liberate learning shows that: 1) learning outcomes are at the core of the competency-based curriculum and these outcomes need to be clear and achievable for teachers, students, and parents; 2) standards development, revision, implementation and assessment form a unified cycle in leveraging change in the primary education system hence all parts of the cycle must be aligned. Other parts of the education system will also need to be aligned over time with competences forming the core reference point. Continuing fragmentation and incoherence will not achieve the change that Kyrgyz Republic hopes for its students, even if one piece or another is well-designed on its own.

The small, landlocked mountainous nation of Kyrgyzstan occupies an important space in Post Soviet Central Asia – as the only parliamentary democracy in the region since independence in 1992. While the country has admirably maintained near-universal enrollment rates in primary and lower-secondary levels, these important gains in educational access have not been accompanied by adequate learning outcomes. As evidenced by the 2017 National Sample Based Student Assessment, about 60% of grade 4 students in Kyrgyzstan lagged in age-appropriate comprehension level. By all estimates, these learning gaps have worsened due to school closures and economic disruptions caused by COVID-19. While improvements are necessary in many aspects of Kyrgyz school education, few issues are as pressing or as consequential as strengthening the system that prepares and supports the 75,000 public school teachers in the country. In this paper we present innovative models of teacher support structures that hold promise for creating an enabling environment for public school teachers in Kyrgyzstan to grow and succeed in their profession. Specifically, the paper will present insights from two complementary on-going initiatives (each led by one of the co-presenters) that focus on structured observation, feedback, and mentoring mechanisms, and creatively use simple technology applications to promote instructional quality in the classrooms and a community of practice across the system. Our paper will situate the scope of these initiatives in the ecosystem of teacher development practices in Kyrgyzstan and discuss their broader policy applicability. We submit that these insights would be relevant for other resource-constrained education contexts that are aspiring to improve support systems for teachers. The first initiative in focus is the technology-enhanced mentoring model of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program of the Institute of Education (IOE) at the American University of Central Asia. Launched in 2018, the program – open to both aspiring and in-service teachers – embeds digital pathways in its structure, curricular content, and delivery processes. At the core of the program is a web-video based mentoring model that assigns experienced teachers as mentors for the MAT candidates (mentees). Both mentors and mentees use a lesson observation rubric and simple digital tools (YouTube, Google Form, Google Classroom, Zoom, etc.) to observe, analyze, and reflect on classroom instruction videos, all under the watchful guidance of a dedicated Faculty Advisor from the MAT program. The teaching observation rubric used is a modified version of the evidence-based Danielson Framework for Teaching. Besides providing constructive feedback to the mentees, the mentors are encouraged to model good practice for their mentees and help them identify possible areas of focus and improvement in the subsequent lessons. In other words, these non-hierarchical dialogs are meant to be both evaluative and generative, specific, yet holistic – attentive to mentees’ relative strengths and weaknesses in the context of the specific classroom where they need to perform. Evidence from the assessments by mentors over four cohorts of MAT practicum indicates that thanks to the video-based observation-reflection-feedback loop, the mentees are able to take ownership of their own growth and demonstrate qualitative improvements in their classroom instruction by the end of the practicum. Internal program evaluation data also suggest that the mentors themselves are appreciating benefits of their engagement in the IOE model. Additionally, having dedicated Faculty Advisors overseeing the mentoring program has not only created a support structure for the mentors, but the entire program has also resulted in a broader community of practice. While these are promising results, the scope and scale of a university-based selective program is limited when compared to the needs of the broader education system. This is where the second initiative of this paper - Okuu Keremet! (Learning is Awesome! in Kyrgyz language) is particularly significant. The ongoing USAID funded Okuu Keremet project (2019 – 2024) is designed to help improve learning outcomes in reading and mathematics of more than 450,000 students in Grades 1‒4 in 1,682 target schools in Kyrgyzstan. The project is implemented by RTI (Research Triangle International) in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Sciences of Kyrgyzstan. To date, around 15,000 teachers have completed special pedagogical training in teaching read and math in the primary grades. An important way the project has integrated technology in the improvement of instructional practice is by creation of a Coaching app that is contextualized for easy access and usage by Kyrgyz school teachers and teacher educators. This app assists methodologists to mentor teachers through classroom observations. The program uses a classroom observation rubric / checklist that is easy to interpret, and to update, using the app interface and based on country’s teacher professional standards. Around 3,500 school administrative staff and methodologists of district education departments were trained to mentor teachers in primary schools. The app is being used in 1,682 target schools. Both the IOE model and the Okuu Keremet project underscore the significance of technology-enhanced mentoring in improving instructional practices of classroom teachers in Kyrgyzstan. Data from both initiatives will be presented at the CIES Conference. As leaders of these respective initiatives, we recognize that the promise of our approaches derives from leveraging the power of digital technologies in learning-rich professional development processes for current and aspiring teacher in ways that are evidence-based, context-informed, cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable. Ongoing implementation and refinement of our respective initiatives have uncovered strong levers and weak links in the broader teacher development structures of Central Asia. One critical area is the importance of framing mentoring as a holistic approach to teacher development that goes beyond benchmarking against a rubric and attends to the intersecting concerns of teachers by promoting an ethos of growth mindset and social-emotional support. We submit that developing such holistic mentoring skills and attitudes among skilled and experienced teachers is a policy priority that must be attended to by the Ministry of Education of Kyrgyzstan and its development partners.

The ability of citizens to think critically and take a well-considered position in life is influenced by their ability to read with comprehension and by the content of what they read. WordCalc is an instrument that contributes to a body of children’s literature that is an important step to building this skill. This abstract introduces WordCalc, an advanced computer program designed to analyze linguistic features of texts. It was developed and improved in the context of two USAID-funded reading projects in the Kyrgyz Republic – Time to Read and Okuu Keremet! The very first version was produced as an Excel program under another USAID reading project in Georgia. The program addresses the lack of children’s books written in local languages, specifically Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek, in the Kyrgyz Republic. By analyzing large amounts of text, WordCalc provides local authors and publishers with language patterns that are attractive and engaging to young readers, leveled according to reading ability. The project conducted a market analysis of children’s books in 2020, revealing the scarcity of modern, locally inspired storybooks for children in schools, libraries, the market, and elsewhere. The available books predominantly consisted of outdated fairy tales and folklore, lacking consideration for the local context and culture as well as contemporary realities and topics. The majority of existing books were imported from Russia and other countries. The limited spectrum of topics highlighted the urgent need for accessible and age-appropriate literature that resonates with children’s interests, language preference and social background. Using WordCalc entails collecting as much text as possible, in different languages and for different age groups, in order to analyze text size, word and sentence counts, word length, high-frequency words and phrases for each language. Through these analyses, the program provides insight into the linguistic characteristics of text read by readers at different levels. The patterns per language and reading level enable authors to tailor their writing to the various reading levels of young readers so that children have a variety of text at the right level for them to develop their reading skill. The refinement of WordCalc resulted in the creation of a comprehensive dictionary comprised of the most frequently used words for grades 1-4 in Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek, totaling 10,000 unique words. This dictionary serves as a foundational resource for creating age-appropriate content that appeals to young readers. In collaboration with linguists, the project team identified and incorporated difficult and rare words specific to grades 1-4, ensuring comprehensive coverage of a rich vocabulary. The Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages in particular face a shortage of text-based resources, including scientific papers, articles, and standardized textbooks for grades 1-4. Therefore, the project team employed a meticulous approach to creating the dictionary, leveraging the expertise of linguists to compensate for the limited resources available for compiling the dictionary. The aim was to ensure that the final product was accurate and useful. To validate the effectiveness of WordCalc as an instrument, the team conducted several reviews of more than 1,000 texts in the three languages. In Okuu Keremet!, around 40 authors and illustrators were trained to use WordCalc, and so far, it has facilitated the production of more than 1,200 new titles, specifically tailored to children’s reading levels and their linguistic context. Moving forward, WordCalc will be introduced to a wider audience, including educators, authors, publishers, and the general public. Its usefulness for creating leveled literature for children will be encouraged among other players such as publishers, textbook writers and others. For example, two big local publishing companies want to use WordCalc as a tool for quality assurance and are already using it in the book production process. WordCalc also serves as a valuable resource for analyzing existing literature for children. By applying the program to previously published books, authors and publishers can gauge whether the books are appropriately aligned with specific ages or grades; they can refine their storytelling techniques and enhance the cultural authenticity of their work. This ensures that the existing literature is adapted to meet the needs and expectations of young readers in the Kyrgyz Republic. In conclusion, WordCalc has proven to be a valuable tool to create new texts for grade 1-4 children that builds not just reading skill but comprehension and critical thinking skills which have been consistently weak in the reading assessment of children. The expansion of genres among children’s books, including information books which are very popular, expands the range of topics that children are thinking about and exposes them to new knowledge, ideas, and feelings. By redressing the lack of literature in local languages such as Kyrgyz and Uzbek, WordCalc is also contributing to the strength of these languages as it codifies a rich vocabulary among young readers across an expanding range of topics. Engaging stories in mother tongue foster a love for reading among young readers. WordCalc’s ability to sift through and analyze text in different languages is a gift to local authors and publishers who can now create “just right” books for children in the Kyrgyz Republic.

The USAID Leading Through Learning Global Platform (LTLGP) and USAID Improving Learning Outcomes for Asia (ILOA) presented a panel at the 2024 CIES Conference on what each project has been learning about establishing and implementing learning networks. Presentations from three USAID learning networks (HELN, GRN, ECCN) and one regional hub managed by LTLGP along with a presentation from ILOA discuss how each learning network utilizes collaboration, learning, and adapting (CLA) to assess how well their networks are reaching and meeting the needs of their members and how they have adapted and adjusted their networks based on CLA fedback.

The USDA-funded “McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program (FFE)” implemented by Mercy Corps (MC) in partnership with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the Borlaug Institute (BI) is a five-year project that is aimed at improving the literacy of school-age children and increasing the use of health, nutrition, and dietary practices among 100,000 students in primary grades 1-4 of 416 target schools and 100 public libraries in the Kyrgyz Republic. In May 2022, the USDA McGovern-Dole program conducted an Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) in target 50 schools. According to this assessment, about 30% of surveyed schools never hold extracurricular literacy activities with parents. Sixteen percent of interviewed students reported that they never read with someone at home. To address this critical issue, the USDA McGovern-Dole program is working with public libraries that are the centers for the development of literate modern citizens. The program builds their capacity and help them host events and activities that promote student literacy and a culture of family reading. Additionally, the program supports public libraries by providing them reading materials, books developed by local authors and illustrators, and methodological guidelines. The books are age- and reading level-appropriate. The methodological guidelines include community engagement strategies such as collaborating with parents, teachers, and community organizations to raise awareness about the importance of reading. The guidelines also cover organizing reading events, summer reading camps, book fairs, and literary festivals to celebrate reading and literacy. The project delivered about 80,000 Kyrgyz and Russian books to 100 target public libraries. Public Libraries are centers for the development of literate modern citizens. And to strengthen the capacity of the schools and public librarians, the program conducted summer camps in 64 target schools and 100 public libraries. More than 1,700 early grade students participated in the reading summer camps.

USAID funded “Okuu Keremet!” is a project (5 years, $19M) designed to help improve learning outcomes in reading and math among 300,000 students in grades 1-4 in 1,686 target schools in the Kyrgyz Republic. As part of its efforts to improve learner performance, the project supported development of two user-friendly applications in four languages (Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek and Tajik). These apps are SabakApp (classroom observation), and BaalooApp (formative assessment), each described below. These apps represent cutting-edge and innovative solutions to challenges that teachers in the Kyrgyz Republic face in classrooms and will play a critical role when it comes to providing teachers with real-time feedback on their teaching strategies as well as instant access to knowledge, best practices, and advice that teachers currently do not have. Regular use of these applications will allow primary school teachers to implement tailored and effective teaching strategies in reading and math that will result in stronger early grade students’ performance. SabakApp is a coaching application tool developed for use by national trainers (coaches), district level coaches, and school-based instructional support teams (IST) to support teachers to improve student outcomes. This app enables these stakeholders to conduct classroom observation, use data to provide focused feedback to teachers, and engage in dialogue with decision makers on how to plan additional coaching support. This app includes the classroom observations forms that are synced with the reading and math curriculum being taught and based on the observation provides immediate feedback to teachers of their strengths and weaknesses. This data then feeds into a dashboard that ranks schools by performance, and thus provides information to the system on which schools to target. To date, more than 13,500 teachers were provided with focused mentoring support at school and district levels by the school and district leaders and national trainers. Early reviews of data collected indicate that the quality of teacher instruction has increased in less than one year. BaalooApp is a formative assessment application developed for use by primary school teachers to identify strengths and weaknesses in student performance, and to support teachers to decide the best approach to remedy the challenges identified – via individual, group or whole-class instruction; to provide individual descriptive and actionable feedback to students; and regularly reflect and adapt their own instruction with the aim to improve student learning outcomes. At present, BaalooApp is being used in 1,686 target schools. According to teachers’ perceptions: “BaalooApp gives both the overall picture on students’ results and the dynamics of each student and helps the teacher to identify both strong and struggling students and gives recommendations on how to work with both each groups” (Primary school teachers, School #5, Jalal-Abad city).

The Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) is a short survey (23 items) that measures primary grade teacher knowledge by a) math domains and b) pedagogical and content knowledge. Math domain included Number Sense, Operations, Geometry, and Measurement. Pedagogical knowledge was measured by problems that measured teacher understanding of Developmental Progression, Scaffolding, and Content knowledge. In this presentation, we will discuss the process of developing the MKT survey, highlight exemplary results from the Kyrgyz Republic, and then discuss the various uses of this survey. The MKT survey build from previous work in measurement of teachers’ MKT in the United States and other countries (Ball et.al., 2008; Cole, 2012). Our goal was to create an instrument that focused on the early primary grade and was easily adaptable to multiple contexts. To do this, we created an initial instrument, conducted cognitive interviews with math and learning experts form several countries, and then conducted a pilot in the Kyrgyz Republic and Nepal. In Kyrgyz Republic, the MKT test was administered to 323 primary grade teachers in 30 pilot schools as a pre-post training survey as part of the USAID Okuu Keremet! The survey was administered online in two languages. Analysis of pre-post test showed that the survey was effective in detecting changes in teacher knowledge across all math domains and pedagogical and content knowledge areas. In Nepal, we conducted cognitive interviews with teachers, providing additional insights into how teachers were thinking about early math knowledge. Finally, we conclude with the different potential uses for this survey, such as diagnosing and measuring changes in teacher knowledge over time and using it as professional development tool to develop teacher knowledge. We will discuss implications for the use of this tool for the wider development audience.

The purpose of this formal group panel presentation is to hold an in-depth discussion on USAID’s investments into system strengthening across Asia over the past decade and how these efforts are situated within the broader global move to focus more intentionally and coherently on education system strengthening. The panel will discuss a 2022 empirical research study (the USAID System Strengthening Review, hereafter “the Review”) conducted by two international research organizations for the USAID Asia Bureau which reviews USAID system strengthening work in 11 Asian countries. This Review offers a qualitative evidence-based analysis relevant to the field of comparative and international education (CIE) and analyzes new data collected from a desk review of relevant project documents, reports, and evaluations, key informant interviews, multi-stakeholder survey, and three deep-dive case studies in Nepal, Cambodia, and the Philippines. The group panel will include three presentations on different aspects of the Review and include discussant commentary and critique to elicit group and audience discussion. The first panel presentation discusses a theoretical framework drawn from the RISE Programme (Pritchett 2015 and Spivak 2021) and recent analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. The Review’s central research questions are guided by these broader global trends, as well as its own analysis framework developed specifically for this study, discussed in Presentation 3. Conclusions are drawn based on this framework, and the overall discussion in Presentations 2 and 3 considers the context of USAID programming in Asia and how new knowledge provides new insights.