Using formative continuous assessment to improve reading instruction in the early grades.

• In Event: Promoting sustainable primary quality education in Haiti: the role of targeted teacher interventions, research, and formative continuous assessment

Proposal

The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate the use of continuous formative assessment as a tool for data gathering about teacher and student performance that is used to inform and improve reading instruction and student reading outcomes.

LRCP Haiti is a five-year USAID funded program aimed at developing reading curriculum and improving reading instruction through coaching support for teachers and school principals. LRCP Haiti worked with its partner, FONHEP, to train coaches to use ASER to assess student reading improvement. LRCP Haiti collects qualitative and quantitative data through an adapted version of the ASER that is monthly monitoring the progress of randomly sampled students from grades 1 and 2 over the course of the 2018 - 2019 academic year. That data is collected monthly and its results are communicated back to the coaches for analysis of strengths and areas of remedial work at the level of their intervention clusters, or the specific levels of individual teachers. At the aggregated level, LRCP Haiti and FONHEP use the collected data to inform better coaching and more effective instruction of reading for the early grades. In addition to helping guide coaching and instruction, formative assessment data provide developmental information about the Early Grade Reading program in Haiti by charting the growth of early grade reading students between baseline, mid-line and end-line data also collected by using EGRA.

Author

• Mohammed Elmeski, American Research Institutes