Presentation delivered at CIES 2017 (Atlanta). A number of linguistically diverse countries are embarked on providing their children with Mother Tongue (MT) instruction to enhance educational quality. Providing MT instruction in multi-lingual environments is not an easy task for governments as it entails choosing the MTs among many, reinforcing their policy, and mobilizing resources. Ethiopia, a country with speakers of over eighty languages, has implemented MT instruction by adopting positions and conventions in the international forums into its constitution and education policy. Currently, it is providing education in about fifty MT languages through developing curriculum materials and capacity building. Scaling up these practices has benefited considerable opportunities articulated in the system. On the other hand, it also came with its own challenges in the process of implementing the policy in its multi-lingual context. The objective of this presentation is to discuss the prospects existing in Ethiopian education system emanating from its constitution and articulated in the Education and Training Policy and frameworks. Besides it highlights core challenges faced in the process of scaling up MT curriculum development and implementation in line with government’s policy promises and provisions in the international conventions in pedagogy, politics and children’s right. Finally, the presentation outlines possible recommendations for future actions.

Presentation delivered at CIES 2017 (Atlanta). Instructional support is essential in the process of creating and supporting instructional change. Educational quality improvement is the elusive goal for many recent literacy improvement programs and strategies. Many programs focus on the inputs of improved textbook ratios, rapid and massive teacher professional development provision, and the provision of ICT support for this system. The Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity, implemented in Kenya from 2014 through 2019, is designed to fundamentally depend on the power and quality of the existing government personnel that were ostensibly assigned to provide instructional support to teachers. The Curriculum Support Officer function, in place in Kenya for decades, was structured to help teachers improve the quality of teaching by providing classroom based support, cluster based training, and ongoing instructional feedback. As is common in many countries in the region who suffer from limited human resources at the local level, these officers are often assigned administrative duties both at odds and distracting from their core instructional support function. Tusome’s work to support the Government of Kenya to revitalize this function and do so in a national manner was both ambitious and somewhat risky. This presentation share the results of Tusome’s efforts with the government to utilize the curriculum support officers as coaches within Tusome with a frank assessment of what process was most effective and which strategies were less effective. It also shares the experiences in Tusome of how a targeted ICT investment in tablets and a structured tool for the officers to use in classrooms created an environment where instructional support was both possible but also more exciting than it previously was. The Tusome National Tablet Program, utilized on a daily basis by these coaches, was designed over several years to integrate within government systems, to be easily implementable by coaches, but also to provide actionable real time data to the education system’s leadership on how teachers were implementing Tusome. The coaching system has provided each of Kenya’s more than 1200 coaches and curriculum support officers with tablets and training how to use them, to support classroom observation and feedback. The presentation shares the results of this over the 2015 and 2016 academic years. Not only have these officers supported up to 20,000 classrooms in a month, but they have also collected structured literacy assessment data from up to 60,000 students at a national level on a monthly basis. This data is collected on an interactive dashboard that Kenyan education leadership is able to use on a consistent basis to change behavior and support large scale instructional reform. The presentation focuses on the possibilities that this instructional support system has for Tusome, increased accountability within the system, and overall quality improvement at the national level for Kenya.

This presentation is an overview of the Assistive Technology Capacity Building Initiative (ATCBI) implemented by RTI International under the USAID-funded READ TA project in Ethiopia. The presentation was given by Wykia Macon and Stephen Backman at the 2017 CIES conference on behalf of also Carmen Strigel and Habtamu Mekonnen.

The Kenya Big Data Activity is an operations research study to help the Kenya Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MoEST) identify the challenges, opportunities, and capacity requirements for implementing a school-based digital Education Management Information System (EMIS) at scale and sustainably. This activity was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Task Order 19, Data for Educational Research and Planning (DERP) in Africa, under the Education Data for Decision Making (EdData II) program. RTI International, in partnership with IBM Corp. Research Laboratory, Kenya and Digital Divide Data, implemented the study, the MoEST coordinated the effort, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other development partners provided collaboration and support.

A National Policy Dialogue Workshop was held on July 1, 2015, followed immediately by a Benchmark Setting Workshop July 2–3, to address the question: "What is an acceptable level of reading and mathematics achievement for Zambian pupils in the early grades of primary school?”

The 2014 Standard 2 National Assessment Survey (NAS) was intended to provide a national measure of pupil reading (local languages and English) and mathematics skills. The final report for the entire survey will consist of three main sections reporting pupil reading performance: • Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) by local language • Early Grade Reading Assessment in English • Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA) This preliminary report focuses on presenting only the results for the EGMA.

RTI International was asked to develop 10 nonreading indicators (NRI) related to improved early grade reading (EGR) in Zambia—or more generally, to improved learning outcomes. Accordingly, the desk study that was required as background research for this effort focused on the international literature related to high performing education systems and schools, or “effective schools”; and our own research and experience in the realm of systems reform and reform support for improved learning outcomes. While some of the findings of this desk study may not be immediately applicable to the Zambian context, they nevertheless helped to create an overall understanding of what is needed by a system to improve learning outcomes, and so inform our effort to develop 10 nonreading indicators. The general findings of this desk study are as follows.

This analysis report for the reading portion of the Grade 2 NAS presents the results for pupil performance on the EGRA in seven local languages, each of which also had a small set of subtasks in English. Additional information about schools, teachers, head teachers, and pupils’ socioeconomic background that was collected alongside the EGRA provides context for many of the results. For grade 2, a nationally representative sample of pupils was selected to take locally developed versions of the EGRA and the Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA), which together comprised the Grade 2 National Assessment Survey (NAS). Outcomes on the EGMA portion of the survey, sponsored by the British Department for International Development (DFID), are documented in a separate findings report.

This is the inception report for the School Quality Assessment for Education and WASH in Three UNICEF-Supported Regions of Tanzania. The report outlines the approach to the study including the fundamental research questions and associated design to implementing the study.

This report summarizes main findings and lessons learned from the piloting of the lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) methodology in the education sector in Ethiopia. It also suggests next steps for applying the LQAS methodology more broadly for education program monitoring.