A Collective Voice to Champion Foundational Learning Outcomes

• In Event: Learner-centered pedagogies and how they enable children to develop capacity to act

Proposal

In today's rapidly evolving world, foundational learning outcomes serve as the bedrock for individual empowerment, economic growth, and societal progress. The collective experience of the PAL over the past 15 years demonstrates that children who fail to acquire these foundational skills in the early grades fall further and further behind with few opportunities to catch up later. In the pursuit of equitable and inclusive education, the People's Action for Learning (PAL) Network harnesses the power of citizen-led assessment (CLA) data to drive positive change.
The CLA approach was born in India in 2005 when Pratham, one of India's largest NGOs, designed an innovative approach to assessing the foundational reading and numeracy abilities of all children, regardless of their schooling status. This assessment is the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India. Over the past 15 years, the ASER tools and approach have been borrowed and adapted by many countries across the Global South. CLAs evolved organically from this approach, spurred by the interest of citizens who understood the importance of obtaining reliable data on children's foundational learning that could build CLAs are not intended to be an internationally comparable metric of learning; they are nationally relevant snapshots of what children can or cannot do.
In addition to nationally looking assessments, the PAL Network responded to the need for a comparable, low-cost assessment that meets these Global South realities by developing the International Common Assessment of Numeracy (ICAN) tool. ICAN, a simple-to-use and scalable tool that measures children's foundational numeracy, is designed to align to SDG 4.1.1 (a), an indicator for which existing international assessments are not able to generate comparable data.
This paper will share insights from the ICAN assessment conducted across 13 countries, reaching over 20,00 children. The paper sheds light on the status of learning outcomes across the sampled locations in addition to sharing the features of ICAN that make it relevant to Global South contexts.

Author

• Winny C Ngeno, PAL Network