Developing cross-country program-level assessments in Latin America aligned to curricular and global proficiency frameworks

• In Event: Assessing Foundational Skill Proficiency Linked to International Standards

Proposal

The Leadership for Change in Education Program is a collaboration between USAID and Teach For All to improve the quality of education of marginalized and vulnerable children and youth in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), focusing on cultivating and developing leadership across different levels of the education systems. Towards this aim, three Teach For All partner organizations (Enseña por Paraguay, Enseña Ecuador, and Enseña por Colombia) developed a Student Learning Assessment Item Bank to provide the program with a mechanism to measure student learning outcomes in academic (math, reading) and non-academic (social-emotional learning) domains.

To ensure that the item bank assessments are measuring what is taught in the classrooms of all three countries, the academic domains were aligned to the respective national curricula for the target academic domains of the three partners. In addition, the items for these domains were also aligned to UNESCO’s Global Proficiency Framework (GPF) to ensure that the proficiency levels we obtain as a result are not only interpretable in national contexts but also comparable across the three countries, across the region, and even globally.

This presentation will highlight the development process of this item bank including the large-scale pilot in all three partners and development of a common set of proficiency levels for all domains. We then report on the findings from the first full year of project implementation conducted during the 2022 school year to nearly 3,000 students across more than 100 classrooms in grades 4-6 in Colombia, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Finally, we present the results on student growth across the domain measured by the item bank and how these inform the trajectory of student achievement in both academic and non-academic domains. We also discuss wide ranging implications including how this development process informs future national and cross-national assessments as well as insights from the learning losses that were observed and may be attributed to the massive schooling disruptions in the past couple of years due to the pandemic.

This presentation will conclude by highlighting how partners and teachers in the Leadership for Change Program have begun to take action by using the data to inform adaptations to their instruction. The implication for pedagogy and classroom practices is that through the item bank, teacher leaders are equipped with rigorous assessment data that give them information on student progress toward competency development to inform adaptations they make to their instruction.

Author

• Alvin Vista, Teach For All