Incorporating an adapted EGRA for students who are deaf onto a digital platform: challenges and lessons learned

• In Event: Adapting the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) for Students Who are Deaf in the Philippines

Proposal

This presentation by RTI International will discuss the challenges and considerations that needed to be addressed to incorporate an adapted EGRA for students who are deaf onto a digital platform for remote administration. Working with School-to-School International and Resources for the Blind, RTI used the open-source Tangerine application to create a digital form of the adapted EGRA instrument that could be administered remotely by students without the presence of a trained assessor. The Tangerine application has been used for years to conduct EGRA assessments in various countries throughout the world. Using a digital tool has helped to greatly reduce the costs and time required to conduct an EGRA and has become standard practice. But the application had not been used for assessments with students who are deaf. This created some interesting and exciting challenges to further explore the capabilities of the Tangerine application.
A major challenge in assessing students who are deaf in a virtual, digital format is in how to express and record communication in sign language, which is a visual form of language. The in-person form of the adapted EGRA for students who are deaf requires two assessors to be physically present, one to administer the questions/subtasks and a second person to record the responses. The Tangerine application allows for the administration of the subtasks to be pre-recorded in Filipino Sign Language (FSL) on a video that is embedded in the Tangerine instrument itself. The student watches the instructions and subtask questions on the video and follows the prompts. The recording of the students’ responses is conducted through a video recording feature on Tangerine where the student taps a button for the tablet to record and store a video image of the student’s physical response in FSL.
This presentation will discuss the challenges and successes in creating new features on Tangerine to make this possible and will describe the piloting and testing that was required to work out the bugs so that the digital instrument could be administered remotely without a trained assessor physically present. It will also discuss the advantages and opportunities of such an approach to reach students with disabilities, especially in remote, difficult to reach locations.

Authors

• Stephen Backman, RTI International

• Carmen Strigel, RTI International