Classroom-based reading assessments: Strategies to improve relevance, utilization and sustainability

• 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

This presentation will explore data from eight countries across sub-Saharan Africa (South African and Tanzania) and Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal and Sri Lanka) where classroom-based reading assessments were implemented in Grades 1 and 2 as part of a comprehensive literacy program over several years. The assessments are implemented on a bi-annual basis in over 5,000 schools by classroom teachers to assess the degree to which students are mastering curricular content. Feedback to address gaps in reading skills is provided to teachers by literacy coaches based on the assessment findings. A review of the assessment implementation revealed variations in administration, frequency and utilization. These variations and their drivers will be discussed as well as factors to increase local ownership of the assessments and utilization of data to inform instruction. Assessment data are compared to implementation monitoring data to understand the relationship between student performance and implementation fidelity. Specific analyses include: Which classrooms are meeting implementation standards/goals? Are there schools, teachers or literacy coaches associated with high or low performing classrooms? With which subtests are students struggling?

This study contributes new evidence to critical questions about classroom-based reading assessments, including: What is the ideal frequency, sampling, and instrumentation strategy given specific contextual factors? In low-resource contexts with limited instruction time, how can teachers and schools most effectively adapt instruction based on assessment data? What skills and support do teachers need to implement effective classroom-based reading assessments? What is the best approach to ensure utilization of the assessment data by teachers and administrators? How can data be blended with a menu of instructional strategies to increase utilization and relevance?

Author

• Christine Beggs, Room to Read