Lessons from the South African Early Grade Reading Study Series

• In Event: Improving education via evidence generation to inform implementation at scale: lessons from South Africa, Nepal and Botswana

Proposal

The Early Grade Reading Studies (EGRS) are a set of nested Randomised Control Trials investigating how to teach reading effectively in the early grades. These studies have been government led in collaboration with academics and funders. The work has contributed to a growing consensus around the importance of improving South Africa's reading outcomes, and has generated an evidence base around what sorts of interventions impact on reading outcomes and how the change process works. The four studies that form this series have been implemented in about 450 schools, this was done to evaluate their impact in order to inform wider scale implementation at a national level.

What did the rigorous scientific testing of EGRS over the last 10 years reveal? If South Africa is serious about improving its literacy levels, it should invest in teachers. This is because one-on-one coaching for teachers proved to be the most effective reading intervention. The most impactful interventions consisted of a pedagogical “triple cocktail” comprising of lesson plans with integrated materials, centralized teacher training and one-on-one in person training. These longitudinal studies are the largest FLN focused RCTs in South Africa. The impact has been 0.23 of a standard deviation or 40% of a year of learning, a significant impact in the context of developing countries; there is evidence of sustained impact of the ‘training’ and ‘training and coaching’ interventions, for Grade 4 learners one year after the end of the intervention. While the initial impact and follow up sustainability findings are important, what is often reported about less frequently, if at all is the intentional design for scaling and the iterative nature of these studies that created a cycle of learning and adapting.

The design for scaling has required careful and consistent decisions informing the intervention design, including establishing a minimum package of materials that is both effective and financially viable; a coach-to-teacher ratio that is affordable and the careful management of resource more broadly. The second tier has been the creation of a learning culture, both adapting the design to provincial hierarchies, while maintaining the integrity of the design and establishing subject matter forums that balanced the national curriculum, the expertise of NGOs and the local curriculum officials’ authority and experience. These are some of the insights gained from leading the EGRS studies and maintaining them as a multi-province, multi-donor and multi-school research programme.

Author

• Nompumelelo L Mohohlwane, Department of Basic Education