Learning About What Promotes Learning: Lessons from Pakistan, Jordan, and Bangladesh

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

Learning to read, write and do basic math represent core skills that contribute to academic success, lifelong learning and sustainable development. In the past decade, donors and governments have spent billions promoting expanded educational access and, more recently, ensuring learning. In many countries, however, achievement in the formal education system has not attained the levels necessary to support sufficient learning. Primary curriculum expectations across the continent include basic skills acquisition in the early grades, and yet somehow those expectations are not being adequately met. Certainly, access to primary education has increased, but as quality of education (including learning basic skills) lags far behind, the search is on for solutions to enable learning and do so at scale.

This panel aims to add to the knowledge base about how to tackle the learning crisis and take change to scale. It will present results from three country sites where colleague organizations are implementing reading programs in partnership with government: Pakistan, Jordan, and Bangladesh. In each setting, partners are working to promote learning – whether just reading or both reading and math – by addressing the range of instructional and environmental supports. Each paper will present estimates of the effect of their work on student outcomes and consider the programmatic elements that contributed to greater learning.

The first paper presents results from the Pakistan Reading Project and considers differences in Urdu reading skills of learner of grade I and grade II as well and teacher instructional practices across two school years during a program that reaches 1.3 million learners. The second paper shares midline results of RAMP, a national program in Jordan that has raised reading and most math outcomes from preprimary to grade 2 and does not only this but narrows the gender gap. Finally, the third paper will compare two routes within Literacy Boost to promote reading at home: face to face meetings with parents versus text messaging and show one to be more cost effective that the other and likely more scalable. The papers will each be presented in a maximum of twenty minutes to allow for the richest possible discussion.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Global Literacy

Chair

• Carol Deshano Da Silva, Save the Children

Individual Presentations

• Results of the Pakistan Reading Project: Data from a quasi-experimental evaluation - Ruman Ijaz Malik, Pakistan Reading Project

• Jordan RAMP initiative midline survey - Aarnout A Brombacher, RTI International

• In-person vs. digital engagement with parents: Descriptive evidence from a reading intervention in Bangladesh - Minahil Asim, University of California, Davis