Assessing Early Grade Reading Comprehension in Morocco: Five Years of Measurements and Results

• In Event: Multilingual education in diverse contexts: reading, achievement, assessment, identity, and policy analysis

Proposal

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is an internationally designed, individually-administered assessment of children’s reading proficiency that measures both decoding and reading comprehension skills. According to its developers, some advantages to EGRA are that it is concerned with basic oral reading skills that are not curriculum-specific. It is also easy and quick to administer and grade and exists in various languages. Additionally, by testing children orally, EGRA makes it easier for assessors to pinpoint the sources of reading comprehension difficulties among test-takers (Eddataglobal, 2004).
In Morocco, EGRA is administered in Modern Standard Arabic (the nationwide language of instruction) but students’ home language is either a variant of Darija (derived from Arabic, Amazigh, French, Spanish), or a variant of Amazigh (indigenous to North Africa). Given that Morocco is characterized by a multilingual and polyglossic linguistic landscape, opinions on how to best teach all Moroccan children have been divided between proponents of the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as the sole language of instruction, and proponents of an adaptive integration of Morocco’s two main language groups, Darija and Amazigh in the early grades.
In previous work (Dahbi, 2018) I conducted an analysis of EGRA’s 2011 reading comprehension subtask text, finding that it may very well not be measuring the skills it aims to assess. While it targets the first two to three years of reading development, EGRA-Arabic-2011 paradoxically uses complex and difficult text to assess this skill. Referring to Jeanne Chall’s model of reading development (Chall, 1996), I suggested that the complexity and difficulty inherent to Modern Standard Arabic need not be conveyed in the first stage of reading development, where children are learning to read before reading to learn. Instead, and with support from Gough and Tunmer’s model of reading development (1986), I argued that an improvement in the EGRA-Arabic reading task would have to reflect better focus on decoding and language comprehension, made possible through the use of familiar vocabulary and syntactic structures.
In this presentation, I extract takeaways from the development and use of the EGRA tool in Morocco over the last five years, acknowledging its evolution, adaptation, and use in nationwide yearlong reading interventions. Specifically, I ask: (1) What has EGRA taught us about how to measure early grade reading comprehension in Arabic in Morocco? (2) How do Moroccan second and third graders perform in reading comprehension throughout one academic school year? To what extent does performance vary by students’ home language?
Specifically, I revisit findings of two sets of studies published by USAID: the Education Data for Decision Making (EdDataII, 2012), and the Reading for Success-Small Scale Experimentation (RFS-SSE, 2017). Using the two studies, I explore links between reading comprehension scores and the level of linguistic complexity of the EGRA subtask version used. Using the longitudinal RFS-SSE, I compile findings from baseline, midline 1, midline 2, and endline studies to track reading comprehension scores by intervention group and by home language.

Author

• Mariam Dahbi, Harvard University