What conditions make it possible to accomplish significant capacity development without running any workshops, without requiring any explicit project deliverables, and with only three short-term technical assistance trips over the course of 19 months? The All Children Reading–Cambodia Activity has been supporting the Education Quality Assurance Department (EQAD) of the education ministry in Cambodia since February 2017. An EQAD staffer, asked about the assistance, said, “The value of the support …is more than I can express… Through collaboration with [the project], EQAD has developed remarkably.” This case study examines how a different approach to providing technical assistance helped EQAD make those “remarkable” strides toward self-reliance.

Assessment of learning and the quality of early learning environments is an important component of early childhood education. This brief outlines the existing early learning assessments of children and environments used in the Asia region, excluding diagnostic and screening assessments.

The quality of instruction in the classroom is key to children's learning and development. This brief looks at the dimensions of guided play, emergent literacy, emergent mathematics, and language of instruction on the quality of instruction.

Training opportunities and appropriate teacher curriculum are often insufficient, and effective regulatory frameworks for preparing, staffing, and monitoring ECE teachers are often lacking. This brief presents selected country-by-country findings on policy relating to ECE teacher quality in six countries in Asia.

Governance and financing of early childhood education (ECE) are complex, involving multiple actors, levels, objectives, and approaches, from general expansion of education access to targeted coverage of the most underserved. Coordination of actors and local community engagement in ECE are important dimensions in the governance and sustainability of ECE, above and beyond specific financing sources and arrangements. More than policies or systems alone, the quality and nature of governance is directly linked to a program’s chances for sustainability.

This report examines available evidence from the Asia region on the current state of ECE interventions, focusing on the 10 countries in the region3 that currently benefit from US Agency for International Development (USAID) education programming. In Asia, many national governments have prioritized the expansion of access and quality improvements of pre-primary education (Sun, Rao, & Pearson, 2015). USAID will support those efforts as part of a coherent approach to improved learning outcomes in primary school.

This report presents the results of a baseline assessment of upper preschool and grade 1 student performance in pre-literacy and early grade reading. The assessment included samples drawn from three provinces in Cambodia: Kampong Thom, Siem Reap, and Battambang (control). The results will serve as a baseline for comparing the impact of early grade reading interventions being implemented in Kampong Thom and Siem Reap. The data reveal lower than expected levels of oral language ability among students in upper pre-school, especially given that Khmer is the mother tongue for nearly all students in the areas covered. For example, students responded correctly to only 3 out of 5 questions concerning a short passage that had been read to them. And in terms of their pre-literacy skills, when shown the letters they were supposed to learn in upper pre-school, students identified them with only 28% accuracy. Performance of grade 1 students on early literacy skills was also much lower than should be expected for the period during which the test was administered. For example, grade 1 students who were almost three-quarters of the way through the school year could only correctly identify letters 34% of the time and were identifying fewer than 10 letters per minute. When simpler forms of consonants and vowels were tested separately, grade 1 students performed better, but still correctly identified letters with less than 50% accuracy. Reading of familiar words in isolation or reading of a short grade-level passage were essentially non-existent.

This report, from the All Children Reading-Cambodia project, documents the results of the teacher survey, desk review and compilation of assessment data and communicates the implications of that research in the form of recommended updates to the syllabus, curriculum and materials for grades 1-2

Cambodia’s teacher professional development (PD) system is at a crossroads. There is a growing realization that the lower than expected learning outcomes in Cambodia are directly related to lower than desirable classroom teaching. To respond to this reality, Cambodia aims to put in place improved systems for pre-service teacher preparation (moving to a 12+4 system and introducing a new Bachelor of Arts in Education (BA [Ed.]) degree, intensive upgrading of existing teachers, and continuous professional development and mentoring. A working group organized by the Teacher Training Department is bringing together stakeholders to assist in the design and implementation of an improved in-service training (INSET) system. The present document aims to bring together pertinent information and evidence on effective continuous professional development (CPD) to support the work of this group.

This report, commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Education Data for Decision Making (EdData) II Program, focuses on ways educational institutions in the tourism and electronics sectors in the Lower Mekong region can better meet private-sector demand and increase the employability of youth. It is designed to provide context and further detail to the labor market assessments (LMA) produced under the USAID Connecting the Mekong through Education and Training (COMET) program. The study was conducted from March to May 2016, with on-the-ground interviews of over 70 Lower Mekong employers and education institutions, as well as significant literature review.