Holistic assessments to inform education in the immediate response to emergencies: Learning from Pilots in Uganda and Kenya

• 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

In the immediate aftermath of displacement, education implementers and practitioners rarely have the opportunity to identify unique learning gaps and needs of displaced children. Without identifying what children already know, programs may not be able to address the specific gaps and challenges learners face, particularly considering their experiences throughout displacement. To create sustainable educational programming in emergency settings, formative assessments can provide practitioners and researchers critical information about displaced learners. The authors examine the validity, reliability, and feasibility of the Holistic Assessment of Learning and Development Outcomes (HALDO) piloted in Uganda and Kenya in 2018. HALDO draws on a constructivist social learning theory that learning is based both on understanding new information through previous experiences and grounded in how we relate to others. To assess this, HALDO includes emergent and more complex literacy and numeracy measures, social and emotional learning measures, and foundational executive functioning skills focusing on memory for children ages 4 to 12. This paper explains the rationale behind the assessment tool, its purpose and development, tests of reliability and validity, and how it has been used in three distinct refugee environments: Rwamwanja and Kyangwali in Uganda and Dadaab in Kenya. Data was collected with 722 children in Uganda in August 2018 and 851 children in Kenya in September 2018 by teams of 20 assessors respectively. We synthesize the lessons learned from the development and implementation of these pilots and emphasize the local adaptations necessary to contextualize HALDO rapidly in emergency contexts. This paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners with our experiences to understand learner populations and rapidly respond to learners’ needs in refugee environments. We discuss findings related to validity, reliability, and feasibility from the pilots and next steps in creating an adaptive holistic assessment to inform refugee education programming.

Author

• Allyson Krupar, Save the Children