Ghana Learning Progress Against Curriculum Expectations (PACE) Assessments: Building Ghana’s capacity to provide differentiated support to struggling schools

• In Event: Assessing learning across contexts: How to design learning assessments, for what purpose, and what can they tell us about student, school and teacher performance?

Proposal

The USAID Partnership for Education Learning Activity (Learning) implemented across all 10 regions of Ghana aims to improve the reading skills of 1.1 million children from over 7,000 schools in the Kindergarten 2, Primary 1 and Primary 2 grades (KG2, P1 and P2 respectively). How can the project track the learning outcomes of pupils in all schools in order to identify struggling schools such that remediation can be provided in a timely manner? In an effort to strengthen the capacity of the education system as a whole, as well as to collect timely data from all schools targeted by the project, we trained more than 800 Ministry of Education Circuit Supervisors (CS) to administer rapid curriculum-based reading assessments, called Progress Against Curriculum Expectations (PACE) Assessments, at each school visit. This allows the project to assess the extent to which pupils are acquiring the skills directly taught by the teachers to determine whether they are “on level.” PACE results allow Learning to then create a typology of schools – low, medium and high performing – displayed on an interactive dashboard. Learning staff and other system actors use this dashboard to target their school support visits to provide additional support and remediation.

In this presentation, we will talk about the evolution of the PACE assessment tool from its early stages to its current incarnation, discussing how Learning developed the tool for KG2, P1 and P2 and made use of anchor and non-anchor items to develop a curriculum-based tool that also allows for comparisons over time. We will also present analyses to show how we are using the data to differentiate between schools at different levels of performance in order to develop a differentiated school support plan.

Authors

• Rachel Hatch, FHI 360

• Yvonne Cao, FHI 360