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Longitudinal impacts of the medium-scale Tayari pre-primary intervention in Kenya: Resisting fadeout effects?

Mon, April 15, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Seacliff B

Proposal

The Tayari Early Childhood Development program has been implemented in Kenya since 2016. The intervention is designed to improve school readiness outcomes for four and five-year-old children attending ECD centers. Tayari has been expanded to all public ECD centers in four Kenyan counties, and is therefore working within and through the government structures for ECD delivery and quality control. Previous Tayari evaluations have shown that the program improves school readiness longitudinally (Piper et al, 2018); that a cross-sectional impact evaluation design shows substantial gains in school readiness; that children’s school readiness is associated with their executive function skills (Willoughby et al, under review); and that one year of Tayari is insufficient to maintain gains in school readiness in Grade 1 literacy and numeracy outcomes (Piper et al, 2018). What remains unclear is whether two years of Tayari interventions has an impact both at grade 1 entry and on later literacy and numeracy skills in early primary grades.
There is substantial evidence of fadeout of the effects of ECD interventions in the Western world (Puma et al., 2012, Lipsey, Farran and Durkin 2018, Hill, Gormley and Adelstein 2015) and less evidence from LMIC because of the limited number of longitudinal studies conducted in these settings. One hypothesis of fadeout is that the measures used to estimate learning are not well structured to detect sustained differences in skills in lower primary school. Thus, the Tayari intervention developed a wider set of tools for student assessment in its fourth wave of data collection. At the fourth wave, half of the children had access to up to two years of ECD as well as one year of early primary. The other half of the children had access for only one year of ECD and up to two years of early primary education. The sample was further split into treatment and control groups to determine whether the gains identified in Tayari in school readiness have an impact on early primary outcomes. The tools utilized include literacy and numeracy assessments, vocabulary measures, executive function tasks, as well as a wide variety of background measures.
The fourth wave of Tayari longitudinal data was collected in September and October 2018. With 2,687 children enrolled in the study who have been tracked through three waves of data collection, this represents one of the largest longitudinal samples in the ECD sector with treatment and control comparisons in sub-Saharan Africa. The rich data will allow us to examine whether and how scores in the key domains change over time, and whether the gains initially identified as a result of the Tayari intervention persist or fadeout, and how that persistence or fadeout overlaps with the domains. The findings of the Tayari fourth wave of impact evaluation will have important contributions to our understanding of how ECD programs should be designed for sustained impact.

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