Equity in reading outcomes: an impact analysis of the Mahay Mamaky Teny (MMT) first grade reading intervention in Madagascar

• In Event: The equity initiative: equity for sustainability; applying the structured questions for equity analysis

Proposal

This paper applies the Education Equity Research Initiative’s Structured Questions approach to an impact evaluation of the Mahay Mamaky Teny (MMT) first grade reading intervention in Madagascar. The intervention is designed similarly to most early grade reading interventions with a focus on capacity building activities to strengthen the Madagascar Ministry of Education’s (MoE) ability to design, implement, and monitor teaching and learning materials, as well as teacher trainings. Using the Structured Questions approach, we determine the program’s impacts on different student groups and ascertain the elements of the program that are more or less equity-building. The analysis includes an examination of preexisting learning gaps between gender, demographic, and socioeconomic groups and whether specific elements of the intervention impact all groups equally.

Early results indicate that while the overall program impact was overwhelmingly positive, the intervention affected different students differently. The presentation examines the aspects of the intervention that have had a differential impact on outcomes of different student subpopulations. To address the latter research question, we investigate the degree to which teachers from the treatment group adhered to the lesson activities as designed by the program, the amount and frequency of program support received, and whether the teachers used the local dialect when teaching reading in Malagasy. The presentation also investigates aspects of teaching such as being on schedule with the designed reading curriculum, teaching practices, availability of learning materials, and student participation. We complete this analysis in two steps. First, we investigate potential discrepancies in these inputs between schools receiving the treatment to ascertain whether, on average, schools that were not performing as highly as other schools were also falling short along these metrics. Thus, we can better pinpoint the school-level factors that contribute to student learning from a program and inputs viewpoint. Second, we augment this analysis and incorporate these school-level heterogeneities when estimating the treatment effect to formally test whether these factors are in fact contributors to student success and whether they have differential impacts along student equity dimensions.

Author

• Wael Moussa, FHI 360