Piloting a New Remotely Administered Measure of Academic and Psychosocial Outcomes: Evidence from Ongoing Validation Studies

• In Event: Perspectives on Measuring Learning Remotely: Evidence from and Reflections on Four Different Remote Learning Assessments

Proposal

In the last two decades, the use of assessments, such as the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been widespread as a tool to help policy makers and educators understand children’s progress toward reading. With a shift in orienting education systems from access to achievement, the use of learning assessments has grown rapidly. Given their wider reach and ease of administration, orally administered learning assessments are being used more frequently than other learning assessments to inform education policy and practice in LMICs.

However, in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 global pandemic, education actors in LMICs were presented with a challenge of how to assess academic and non-academic outcomes when traditional face-to-face administration modalities were not possible. Distance learning programs were being designed and implemented, but teams did not have the usual assessment tools from which to draw to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs.

Save the Children sought to fill this gap by developing and testing an instrument to assess literacy, numeracy, and psychosocial outcomes that could be administered remotely. In order to enable a rapid development process and use items and a structure already familiar to teams, Save the Children leveraged existing assessments such as the Holistic Assessment of Learning and Development Outcomes (HALDO), International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA), International Social-emotional Learning Assessment (ISELA), Literacy Boost Reading Assessment (LBRA), and Numeracy Boost Assessment (NBA) to develop the pilot instrument.

In this paper, we briefly review evidence from four alpha phase validation studies in Bangladesh, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Zambia. We then present preliminary findings from the subsequent beta phase of testing in partnership with the Child Study Center at Yale University, while providing an overview of the ultimate objective of the current phase of testing - releasing a fully validated remote assessment of learning as a global public good - and the steps we are taking to achieve this.

Authors

• Sascha Hein, Free University Berlin

• Clay Westrope, Save the Children US