Effectiveness of accelerated school readiness models to bridge gaps in pre-primary education: lessons learned across five low- and lower-middle-income countries

• In Event: Jumpstarting primary school: Approaches to ECE for near-1st graders with no prior access

Proposal

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.2 states that all children should have access to quality early childhood education. Globally, many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) face significant challenges in providing pre-primary education to their young children. Accelerated school readiness (ASR) programming attempts to fill this gap through providing a short 6– to 12–week school readiness course just before children begin Grade 1. ASR programs are not intended to replace a full-year pre-primary course, but rather to act as an interim option. The ASR model leverages existing classrooms that are otherwise unoccupied during the break between school years. “Facilitators” (teachers) may be Grade 1 teachers, trained community volunteers, or others.


Our organization conducted a series of randomized control trials (RCTs) to assess the impacts of ASR models across Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, Lao PDR, Mozambique, and Tanzania. All of these impact evaluations used nearly identical measures (IDELA or MODEL) to assess school readiness, which allowed us to conduct a meta-analysis to look at the effectiveness of ASR models in building overall school readiness (across literacy, numeracy, socio-emotional development, motor development, and executive function), and also focus on early literacy and early numeracy in particular. The total analytic sample size included 285 communities with 3,731 children (Cambodia 60 communities, 861 children; Côte d’Ivoire 47 communities, 475 children; Lao PDR 61 communities, 664 children; Mozambique 60 communities, 1,200 children; and Tanzania 57 communities, 531 children). Randomization was at the community level in all countries.


At the individual country level, some showed positive impacts of ASR programming on children’s school readiness (Lao PDR, Mozambique and Tanzania), whereas others did not confer any benefit (Cambodia and Côte d’Ivoire). This variation in results is not surprising. While all five countries carried out the same general ASR model, there was substantial variation across countries in terms of (a) how many weeks the program was offered; (b) who acted as facilitators (teachers) for the program (Grade 1 teachers, community volunteers, or staff brought in from elsewhere in the country); (c) how and how much there was government involvement in program oversight; (d) how much children had access to other pre-primary education programming in their communities; and (e) whether the program had a language transitioning element for children who did not speak the language of Grade 1 instruction at home. Therefore, in addition to reviewing the results of the meta-analysis, we will discuss what factors of context and implementation seemed to play a role in how successful the ASR model was in a given country.


This paper should provide valuable lessons learned for the field of early childhood education, with special relevance for countries seeking to find low-cost and effective ways to expand access to pre-primary education.

Authors

• Elizabeth Spier, American Institutes for Research

• Mitchell Morey, American Institutes for Research