The Status of Instruction Study (SIS) aims to shed light on teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, skills, and behaviors, as well as the available resources at the school level and for the targeted subjects, and how these resources are used. The SIS was designed to inform the customization and development of student textbooks, teacher guides, and teacher professional development approaches. This report presents the SIS methodology and findings from online surveys with over 4000 teachers, 183 school directors and 131 methodologists from all regions of Uzbekistan, including the Republic of Karakalpakstan and Tashkent City.

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).

To support the Ministry of Public Education (MoPE) in achieving its reform agenda, USAID initiated the Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program (UEEP) to improve the quality of education and enable all students to be proficient in 21st century skills such as problem solving and critical thinking. UEEP is implemented by a Consortium of partners including RTI International, Florida State University, and Mississippi State University. The Program aims to achieve three overarching results: improved Uzbek language (UL) reading and mathematics outcomes in grades 1–4; enhanced information and communication technology (ICT) instruction for grades 1–11, and improved English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction in grades 1–11. In this presentation, we will describe the process of revising the student standards for Grades 1-4 in mathematics, led by Florida State University and UEEP math experts, with ongoing review and feedback from MoPE representatives. The revision of student standards was the first step of the country’s curricular reform, followed by the creation of TLMs and a corresponding teacher professional development package. This process consisted of several stages, beginning with comparing current MoPE standards with the GPF, student math standards from South Korea and the TIMSS framework for assessment. These three resources were chosen for specific purposes. The TIMSS framework reflected the Government of Uzbekistan’s priority to prepare children in Grade 4 to take TIMSS assessment and perform well. This framework only reflected Grade 4 learning, so it was used primarily to backwards map other standards in Grades 1-3 to ensure that all content on the TIMSS framework was adequately covered by the end of Grade 4. The GPF was the most detailed reference, and was used to map the current standards and identify gaps in the progression. However, there was concern from the Government of Uzbekistan that the GPF might be targeting skills that are too easy for children in Uzbekistan. Because of this, we also brought in the South Korea standards, which provided us with a reference from a country that is seen as a model in Uzbekistan, and we were able to use the South Korea standards to make decisions about certain skills. This process allowed us to ensure that the standards development process met national priorities (i.e. Presidential Decree on Improving Math Education, 2020), reflected best international practices in mathematics, created standards that were age appropriate and measurable, and was logically organized. We will discuss how we used a quantitative comparative analysis of Uzbekistan's existing standards for different grade levels with the GPF and South Korea standards to identify revisions needed to facilitate more alignment. The rigor of that exercise allowed us to revise and to create a set of standards that could be approved by MoPE. The rigorous student standards development process described in this presentation allowed us to create a set of standards that were approved by MoPE. These standards were the cornerstone of further reforms including creating a scope and sequence and Teacher/Learning Materials (TLMs) for Grades 1-4, currently being piloted with 10,000 teachers across Uzbekistan.

The Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program conducted a multi-phased Status of Instruction Study (SIS1 and 2) to understand the resources available and in use by schoolteachers in Uzbekistan. In the SIS2, the Program applied a descriptive quantitative design, considering the contextual realities resulting from COVID-19. The study was designed in an online survey system and the link to the survey was shared through the Ministry of Preschool and School Education via Telegram channels. This presentation examines elements of primary and secondary English teachers’ planning and preparation, their teaching skills, and ability to create a positive learning environment that fosters student engagement active learning. The implications of the two studies enabled the Ministry to generate and implement a number of recommendations including, but not limited to: 1) development and provision of teacher guides with sample lesson plans and explicit teaching strategies, 2) development of online learning courses for teachers on teaching strategies and techniques, 3) enhancing guidance on summative and formative assessment, 4) enhancing teachers’ skills in incorporating meaningful independent and group work and 5) upgrading of teachers’ content knowledge in selected subjects. This presentation explores, from the Ministry’s perspective, the importance of education system research. The Ministry presents and elaborates on their recommendations to maximize opportunities for co-creation of research – beginning with identification of research questions, design, implementation, analysis and dissemination.

This presentation featured an SEL Guidebook, which builds on the USAID-commissioned systematic review of SEL. The authors reviewed and researched the emerging evidence for integration of SEL into the school and classroom, including evidence-based approaches that target three categories of SEL: (1) SEL in the classroom and curriculum (i.e. pedagogical interactions that foster SEL and well-being); (2) explicit student-focused activities, and (3) School Climate (what contributes to a context that supports, welcome and nourishes SE development). The findings from this review informed a Guidebook that provides : o Comprehensive set of SEL approaches and activities, with practical examples of each; o Guide for SEL contextualization; o Series “how-to” scenarios for designing and implementing SEL programs based on a context’s needs, culture and policy context. This guidebook serves as a significant contribution to the field in that it identifies the evidence for SEL in LMICs and synthesizes into actionable and digestible information for the busy program designer, donor and/or implementing partner.

The purpose of this panel presentation is to present the results of two uptake studies to understand how mathematics, Uzbek language arts, ICT, and EFL teachers in Uzbekistan are using and applying newly developed teaching and learning materials in the classroom.

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

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for understanding materials usage in primary classrooms in Sub-Saharan Africa that centers teachers’ actions and voices. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 focuses on improved primary education around the world. To meet this goal, many large, donor-funded interventions aim to improve education through provision of teacher’s guides and student textbooks. However, what many of these interventions lack is a systematic way to understand how and why teachers are making pedagogical decisions while using materials. There is a large body of work that seeks to understand how teachers make decisions as they teach, and the ways these decisions are influenced by their knowledge and beliefs. Drawing from this work, we describe a methodology and set of tools that uses observations and interviews to identify key decisions that teachers make in the classroom and why teachers made those decisions. We piloted and iteratively refined this methodology over the course of three studies and use examples from these studies to illustrate the methodology. By closely observing and listening to teachers, we gain insights that allow us to continually refine and improve materials to ultimately improve the quality of classroom instruction.

In 2009 the Philippines introduced a mother tongue-based multilingual education language policy requiring the “mother tongue” as the language of instruction (LOI) in kindergarten through grade 3. Using teacher classroom language data collected from four LOI groups in 2019, we compared the frequency of teachers’ use of the target LOI in different contexts, including urban versus rural classrooms, classrooms with relatively homogeneous student language backgrounds versus more heterogeneous classrooms, and classrooms with materials in the target language versus classrooms without. We also examined language usage against characteristics of the teacher populations, including language background, years of experience, training, and beliefs about the best language for initial literacy. The results strongly suggest that the most influential levers for increasing teacher usage of a designated LOI in these contexts are ensuring that teachers are assigned to schools where the LOI matches their own first language and providing teaching and learning materials in the target LOI, especially teacher’s guides. These two factors were more strongly and more consistently correlated with teacher use of the LOI than all other variables examined. The linguistic homogeneity of the student population also showed a statistically significant though lower impact on teacher language usage. This document was developed with support from the American people through the United States Agency for International Development.

This manual guides teachers through the process of designing and using Individual Education Programs (IEPs) for learners with specific learning needs.