Beyond impact: Forging the link between impact evaluation findings and policy decisions

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Impact evaluations & program plans: deciphering the data for decision making

Proposal

In September of 2018, Evaluating Systems, confirmed the initial findings in its midline evaluation of Learning, USAID’s flagship early grade education program in Ghana. The impact scores were impressive and were both statistically and practically significant after just one year of implementation. While, as evaluation experts, we recognized the importance of these findings, when sitting with government officials, policy makers, and implementers, the impact scores were only a small part of their decision making processes.

The following report and presentation provides an in depth analysis into the impact of the Learning early grade reading program. It illustrates how we worked with our stakeholders to ensure that our evaluation spoke to them. It also shows how we proactively endeavored to bring meaning to results and even revised our analysis to look beyond impact scores, to provide the kind of context and guidance that policy makers need.

Background:

The Government of Ghana has made it a priority to improve the performance of its students nationwide. While there are a multitude of factors contributing to low performance among Ghana’s children, there is an ongoing, lively discussion among education policymakers and practitioners on how to improve these scores and how to implement policy to improve reading performance on a mass scale in Ghana.

To contribute to this discussion, USAID/Ghana Evaluating Systems (run by Social Impact Inc.) is conducting an independent, quasi-experimental impact evaluation of the Ghana Early Grade Reading (EGR) Program implemented by USAID/Ghana Learning (run by FHI 360) in 2017-2019. This program is implemented at scale and is a comprehensive program with interventions at both the classroom level as well as the national, regional, and district management level. The program is designed to support mother tongue and phonics-based instruction through a structured pedagogy model. The purpose of this impact evaluation is to generate rigorous evidence that can improve the ability of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Ghana Education Service (GES) to implement early grade reading programs in local language as well as improved approaches to reading instruction.

Authors

• Monica Gadkari, Social Impact

• James Dobson, US Agency for International Development (USAID)