Background

Countries around the world have boosted primary school enrollment to historically unprecedented rates.  Seeking to honor the commitments of the United Nations’ Education for All (EFA) campaign and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), low-income countries, with international support, are enrolling children in primary school at nearly the rates of high-income countries. But are students learning much?

The evidence, when available, indicates that average student learning in most low income countries is quite low.  A recent evaluation of World Bank education lending shows that improvements in student learning are lagging significantly behind improvements in access to schooling (World Bank: Independent Evaluation Group 2006).  Results from those few low income countries that participate in international assessments such as PISA or TIMSS (and inferring from the results of regional assessments such as PASEC and SACMEQ) indicate that the median child in a low income country performs at about the second percentile of a high income country distribution (worse than 98 percent of students tested in the high income countries).  From these results we can tell what low income country students did not know, but cannot ascertain what they did know (often because they scored so poorly that the test could not pinpoint their location on the knowledge continuum).  Furthermore, most national and international assessments are paper-and-pencil tests administered in grades four and above (that is, they assume students can read and write).  Many of these tests have difficulty discerning whether students score poorly because they lack the knowledge tested by the assessments, or because they lack basic reading and comprehension skills.

The ability to read and understand a simple text is one of the most fundamental skills a child can learn.  Without basic literacy there is little chance that a child can escape the intergenerational cycle of poverty.  Yet in many countries, students enrolled in school for as many as six years are unable to read and understand a simple text.  Recent evidence indicates that learning to read both early and at a sufficient rate are essential for learning to read well.  Acquiring literacy becomes more difficult as students grow older; children who do not learn to read in the first few grades are more likely to repeat and eventually drop out.  Global efforts to expand access to education may be undermined if parents, faced with difficult economic choices and the knowledge that students are not acquiring basic reading skills, remove their children from school.  In many countries it is apparent that this trend may be already occurring: while more students are enrolled, primary school completion and cohort survival rates (a measure of education system output as well as student “survival” in the system) have not kept pace with expanded enrollments.

In the context of these questions about student learning and continued investment in education for all, ministries of education and development professionals in the World Bank, USAID and other institutions have called for the creation of simple, effective and low-cost measures of student learning outcomes (Abadzi 2006; Center for Global Development 2006; Chabbott 2006; World Bank: Independent Evaluation Group 2006).  Some analysts have even advocated for the establishment of a global learning standard or goal, in addition to the existing Education for All and Millennium Development Goals (see Filmer, Hasan and Pritchett 2006), while others influentially conclude that what really makes a difference in the contribution of education to development is whether learning achievement is increased (Hanushek and Woessmann 2007).  Whether reading well by a certain grade could be such a goal is open to debate; but the issue of specific and simple learning measures has been put on the policy agenda.  In addition, the GAO has urged USAID to establish learning outcome measures, and has been congratulatory towards USAID’s attempt to focus in on something such as early grade reading (Government Accountability Office 2007).  Congress has called on USAID to further explore the notion of a reading goal for its education programs.  Recent discussions within the FTI Secretariat suggest that a reading benchmark may well become part of FTI progress tracking mechanisms.  To respond to this demand, work began on the creation of an Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA).  What was needed was a simple instrument that could report on the foundation levels of student learning, including assessment of the first steps students take in learning to read: recognizing letters of the alphabet, reading simple words, and understanding sentences and paragraphs.  Development of EGRA began in October 2006, when the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), through its EdData II project, contracted RTI International to develop an instrument for assessing early grade reading.  The objective was to help USAID-partner countries begin the process of measuring, in a systematic way, how well children in the early grades of primary are acquiring reading skills, and ultimately spur more effective efforts to improve performance in this core learning skill.

Based on a review of research and existing diagnostic tools and assessments, RTI developed a protocol for an individual oral assessment of student’s foundation literacy skills.  In order to obtain feedback on and confirm the validity of this protocol and overall approach, RTI convened a meeting of cognitive scientists, early-grade literacy experts, research methodologists, and assessment experts to review the proposed key components of the instrument.  During the workshop, participants were charged with bridging the gap between research and practice; that is, merging advances in the reading literature and cognitive science with assessment experiences.  Researchers and practitioners presented evidence for measuring literacy acquisition within the early primary grades. In addition, they were asked to identify the key issues to consider in designing a multi-country, multi-language early grade literacy assessment protocol.  The workshop, hosted by USAID, The World Bank, and RTI in November 2006, included more than a dozen experts from a diverse group of countries, as well as some 15 observers from institutions such as USAID, the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, George Washington University, the South Africa Ministry of Education and Plan International, among others.  A summary of the workshop proceedings can be found at www.eddataglobal.org.

During 2007, the World Bank supported an application of the draft instrument in Senegal (French and Wolof) and the Gambia (English), while USAID supported the application in Nicaragua (Spanish).  In addition, national governments, USAID missions and NGOs in South Africa, Kenya, Haiti, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and other countries began to experiment with the application of certain components of the assessment (with and without the involvement of RTI).  In the interest of consolidating these experiences and developing a reasonably common approach for assessing children’s literacy acquisition, RTI, with the support of the World Bank and USAID convened a second technical workshop in March of 2008.