Large-scale Experimental Research on Early Grade Reading: Insights from India, Kenya and South Africa

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

In the Global North, the main impetuous in the past three decades for the focus on education system improvement has been economic competition as manifest in country comparisons that emerged out of cross-system students achievement studies. In England of the 1990s, the education improvement problem was associated with ‘long tail of disadvantage’ and in the United States it was about ‘ambitious teaching’ and ensuring that ‘no child is left behind’. Under slogans like ‘raising the bar and narrowing the gap’, the improvement problem in Europe and North America was understood as systems improving the scores (as measured on standardised performance tests) of the poorest and most disadvantaged children and improving the country aggregates relatively higher performance systems.

The education challenge in low and lower-middle income countries is substantially different. Since the 1960s, the question of universal access, i.e. schooling for all, dominated the policy discourse on education in the South. But over the last two decades, as systems began to deliver more and better school infrastructure, employ qualified teachers and thereby achieved close to universal enrolment and much improved attendance, researchers and policy makers began to recognise that many systems were not providing all children with the opportunity to learn. Access in and of itself could not be an end as evidence emerged across contexts that a substantial portion of the newly enrolled children were not learning to read and write and do mathematics adequately in the early grades. The change problem was not at the margins with a small percentage of learners lagging behind or about raising the aggregate levels a few percentage points to complete against a neighbouring country on a cross-national test or even moving towards more ambitious teaching. Rather the problem was how to transition entire education systems that had historically been designed as agencies of selection to become systems that ensured that the overwhelming majority of children became academically proficient.

With this context as background, the scholarship in the Global South has followed a different pathway. While there are clearly a number of different strands or traditions in low and lower-middle income country contexts, a particularly strong and coherent approach has emerged in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Unlike the ‘change lesson’ approach from successful system change journeys in the Global North, researchers working on system improvement in low and low-middle income countries are gravitating toward large-scale experimentation to better understand what it would take to help their systems transition to providing genuine learning opportunities for all. This panel explores experimental research currently underway in three contexts: India, Kenya and South Africa. The three cases , while differing in some important respects, demonstrate that the use of randomised control trials and similar robust methods can advance knowledge of the generative mechanisms underlying system improvement at scale.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Global Literacy

Individual Presentations

• Experience and Evidence: The Journey to Develop Effective Models of Learning Improvement in India - Rukmini Banerji, Pratham; Shobhini Mukerji, Jamel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL); Faiyaz Ahmad, Pratham; John Floretta, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

• Theory Based Evaluation in Kenya: Using Research to Inform National Scale Implementation - Richard Belio Kipsang, Ministry of Education, Kenya; Benjamin Piper, RTI International

• Experiments as Opportunities to Learn: Thinking differently about RCT research on early Grade Reading - Brahm D Fleisch, University of Witwatersrand; Stephen Taylor, South African Department of Basic Education; Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, South African Department of Basic Education; Carol Nuga-Deliwe, Department of Basic Education (National) South Africa