When her child is sick, a mother reaches for the thermometer to check for a fever. Reliable and easy to use, a thermometer is the instrument of choice for quickly assessing a child’s physical well-being.
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| A team of Nicaraguan test administrators is using the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) to assess student literacy one-on-one with first-, second-, and third-graders in 50 schools in Nicaragua, including 10 bilingual Miskitu-Spanish schools. [Photo: Amber Gove] |
When evaluating better ways to teach children how to read and write, educators worldwide need an equally reliable tool that provides quick, easy-to-interpret feedback on students’ literacy.
RTI International designed such a tool under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) EdData II project to help educators in low-income countries break the pattern of illiteracy among their poor.
The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is a 15-minute test administered orally to students in the early grades of primary school. EGRA evaluates students’ foundation literacy skills, including pre-reading skills like phonemic awareness and listening comprehension, which have been shown to predict later reading abilities. Education ministries and their donor partners can then identify and address learning barriers before students grow older and struggle even more to break through to literacy.
In many developing countries, children enrolled in primary school for three and as many as six years cannot read and understand even a simple text. A student who does not learn to read in the first few grades is more likely to repeat grades and eventually drop out of school. This pattern is repeated generationally as illiterate parents are excluded from the economic opportunities they need to ensure quality education for their children.
This thermometer-like diagnostic complements conventional paper-and-pencil tests. Existing national and international tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, thoroughly assess students’ reading proficiency, yet inherently assume basic literacy.
“In low-income countries, the trouble is that most students score below the ‘floor’ of those tests,” said RTI senior education researcher Amber Gove. So, the tests reveal only what the students do not know, and not what skills teachers can build on.
EGRA can be adapted to fit most alphabetic languages and cultural contexts and is gaining momentum as an instrument for quickly diagnosing children’s literacy. USAID and the World Bank have backed pilot studies of EGRA across the globe to refine the instrument and the teaching recommendations that flow from the assessment results.
“With EGRA, we are taking proven methodologies that have been applied in the U.S. and Europe for about 10 years and adapting that to the needs of developing countries,” Gove explained. RTI recently began a USAID-funded bilingual pilot in Nicaragua.
A Tool for Social Integration
Despite investment in education by the government of Nicaragua, student performance is poor. Moreover, national literacy tests are administered sporadically and only two assessments were conducted between 2002 and 2006, both in grades three and six. Consequently, Nicaraguan schools lack systematic information on the progress of their younger students on learning to read and write.
RTI is administering EGRA to first-, second-, and third-graders across Nicaragua with the hope that it will become a tool for Nicaragua’s education system to gather consistent data on early-grade literacy.
“If you find out earlier what is going on, you can make adjustments, rather than waiting until children are ready to drop out due to academic failure,” said Vanessa Castro, the pilot coordinator and senior researcher at the Center for Research, Education, and Social Activism (CIASES), RTI’s partner in the USAID-funded application.
EGRA is being conducted in 40 Spanish-speaking schools and 10 bilingual schools where native Miskitu is the primary language of instruction. Illiteracy is particularly high among the Miskitu and other indigenous populations living in remote areas off the country’s Caribbean coast.
Bilingual education is the best method to help the Miskitu students succeed in school, Castro said. So, despite the difficulty of tailoring EGRA to Miskitu, RTI developed a new adaptation of the instrument and trained bilingual enumerators to administer it.
Each Nicaraguan team of test administrators—whether Spanish or Miskitu—is conducting EGRA in one school per day, assessing approximately 50 students per school. When it completes the pilot, RTI will analyze the reliability of the test, looking for further refinements.
A Tool with Global Potential
Elsewhere, other education groups have adopted EGRA for their own literacy testing. Save the Children piloted the instrument in Haiti in both French and Creole. Plan International adopted the French version of EGRA from RTI’s Senegal pilot and developed instructional approaches specific to the context in Mali and Niger. In Bangladesh, BRAC developed and tested a version of the instrument in the local Bangla script. In Afghanistan, CARE developed and tested a version in Dari.
On March 13–14, 2008, RTI will reconvene the international literacy experts who originally critiqued the instrument in November 2006 for a workshop at which RTI and its partners who have conducted their own EGRA pilots around the world will present their findings. The experts will then recommend further refinements or will give EGRA an official seal of approval.
“EGRA is a diagnostic tool for educators to improve their instructional approaches, not a high-stakes accountability test,” Gove explained. “Decisions about rewarding or sanctioning individual schools, teachers, or children will not be based on the results of EGRA.”
Enthusiasm is growing for EGRA to become a key diagnostic in the toolbox of education systems, schools, and teachers in low-income countries who want to customize their literacy instruction to meet the needs of their students. RTI will continue to lead EGRA enhancements and advocate that success in early reading become a goal of international organizations and education initiatives, such as the Education For All Fast-Track Initiative.
More information:
Amber Gove, agove@rti.org;
EdData II website: www.eddataglobal.org
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