| dc.description.abstract | Teaching young children to read is the cornerstone of improving educational outcomes and has far-reaching implications. Unless they learn to read at an early age, children cannot absorb more advanced skills and content that rely on reading. The challenges rooted in poor reading skills lead to disappointing results and often, early dropout from the education system. Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) helps to monitor the progress of learners in reading skills acquisition in the early years of schooling. The baseline EGRA was conducted in 11 local languages in October 2016.
A stratified two-stage cluster sampling design was used. Data from Education Management Information System (EMIS) 2015 provided the list of public primary schools and their respective pupil enrolment figures for each class. Proportional number of schools were randomly selected from each TDMS Coordinating Centre within selected districts (Table 1.01, Page 3) and then a random sample of 20, 10 and 10 learners present in the school on the day of the survey was selected from each of P 1, P 2 and P 3 classes, respectively. Survey weights for sampled learners were accounted for in the analysis in order to obtain unbiased estimates of the desired benchmarks (proportions and means).
A total of 189 Assessors and 12 Data Quality Assurance (DQA) officers were recruited for this exercise. They underwent rigorous training which ensured that they became familiar with the administration of an oral interview, as well as the specific implementation and coding practices associated with EGRA. The assessment tools were uploaded on Tangerine software. Since EGRA is individually administered by assessors, an Inter-rater Reliability (IRR) was computed out twice to ensure consistency of Assessors with the gold standard in the administration of the EGRA tool. Piloting of EGRA instruments was also done before scale-up to full data collection, to ensure the instruments performed as expected. Assessors gained valuable hands-on experience and trainers identified gaps in assessor understanding and skills.
Each sampled learner in P 1, P 2 and P 3 classes from 405 public primary schools was assessed orally and individually both in the local language used as a medium of instruction and in English. In addition, there were three (3) contextual instruments administered, namely: Lesson observation, Pupil interview schedule and Headteacher interview schedule. All these instruments were intended to establish the context of learning reading at school and at home. | en_US |
