Early Grade Reading Research Articles

Large learning gains in pockets of extreme poverty: Experimental evidence from Guinea Bissau

Children in many extremely poor, remote regions are growing up illiterate and innumerate despite high reported school enrollment ratios. Possible explanations for such poor outcomes include demand – for example, low perceived returns to education compared to opportunity cost; and supply – poor state provision and inability of parents to coordinate and finance better schooling. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in rural Guinea Bissau to understand the effectiveness and cost of concerted supply-based interventions in such contexts. Our intervention created simple schools offering four years of education to primary-school aged children in lieu of the government. At endline, children receiving the intervention scored 58.1 percentage points better than controls on early grade reading and math tests, demonstrating that the intervention taught children to read and perform basic arithmetic, from a counterfactual condition of very high illiteracy. Our results provide evidence that particularly needy areas may require more concerted, dramatic interventions in education than those usually considered, but that such interventions hold great potential for increasing education levels among the world’s poorest people.

Benchmarking oral reading fluency in the early grades in Nguni languages

To prevent children from falling behind in the developmental sequence of reading, a shared vision of what reading success looks like is required. This paper provides the first benchmarks for early grade oral reading fluency that are necessary (albeit not sufficient) to read for meaning in three Nguni languages – isiZulu, isiXhosa and Siswati - belonging to the Southern Bantu family of African languages. In contrast with previous benchmarking methodologies, our approach is informed by a non-parametric analysis of longitudinal early grade reading assessment (EGRA) data, guided by reading development theory. The EGRA-type data used for this analysis is the largest compilation of data on early grade fluency in these languages, with comparative assessments for nearly 14,200 children. Analysing empirical regularities and reading trajectories, we identify a lower fluency threshold of 20 correct words per minute (cwpm) and an upper fluency benchmark of 35 cwpm for the early grades. These benchmarks contribute to guiding curriculum policy, provide specificity to improve tracking of literacy progress and address gaps in the literature on reading in African languages.

The use of instructional time in early grade reading classrooms: A study in Herat Province of Afghanistan

The purpose of this study was to investigate how much time teachers in sampled schools in Herat Province of Afghanistan spend teaching literacy in early grade classrooms, how they use the time, and what factors lead to instructional time loss. We found that the actual time spent teaching literacy was often shorter than the allocated time. We also identified a few shared teaching practices that indicate a poor use of instructional time. Time loss factors identified included teacher and student absenteeism and tardiness, unofficial school closures and summer break extensions, and teachers’ maternity leaves.

Building back better to avert a learning catastrophe: Estimating learning loss from COVID-19 school shutdowns in Africa and facilitating short-term and long-term learning recovery

We model learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential for cost-effective strategies to build back better. Data from Early Grade Reading Assessments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania, and Uganda suggest half to over a year’s worth of learning loss. In modeling losses over time, we found that learning deficits for a child in grade 3 could lead to 2.8 years of lost learning by grade 10. While COVID-19 has stymied learning, bold, learning-focused reform consistent with the literature reviewed in this paper—specifically reform on targeted instruction and structured pedagogy—could improve learning even beyond pre-COVID-19 levels.

Social Cognitive Approach through Interactive Multimedia for Early Reading Learning

This study developed a learning model to improve students’ early reading skills in Indonesia. The model is based on social cognitive learning theory and is implemented using interactive multimedia. The research method uses Design-Based Research (DBR) and the subjects are 195 first and second graders of an elementary school in Bandung, West Java. The findings of the study show that social cognitive learning can be integrated and implemented through interactive multimedia and that interactive-multimedia-assisted social cognitive model (IMAS Model) can improve early reading skills. Students’ average early reading skill scores were measured using Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) instrument before and after intervention to see the effectiveness of the model. Pre-test – post-test results comparison showed that students’ average early reading scores increased after learning using IMAS Model. Students’ average scores of reading letters, reading syllables, reading words, reading sentences, and reading comprehension skills at pre-test were 78.06, 67.06, 60.92, 55.21, and 44.95, respectively. These scores respectively increased to 92.71, 92.45, 88.58, 74.60, and 87.08 at post-test, indicating that IMAS Model is effective to increase early reading skills.

An examination of early grade reading assessments in Central Asia: using factor analysis to determine the latent data structure in Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik

The early grade reading assessment (EGRA) is frequently used in low and middle-income countries to inform the state of reading outcomes and reading instruction (Dubeck & Gove, 2015). Although the EGRA has been administered in languages with varying orthographies and scripts, there is little research on the cross-linguistic comparability of the psychometric properties of its subskills in a wide range of languages and diverse writing systems. In this study, Grade 2 and 4 assessment results in the Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik languages from the Kyrgyz Republic (4751 pupils) and Tajikistan (4328 pupils) were analyzed to determine the number and nature of the underlying EGRA constructs. These three languages represent very different languages families but all three use the Cyrillic or modified Cyrillic script. Principal axis factor analysis was employed on nationally representative samples to factor analyze reading results on nine reading subtasks for Grade 2 and seven reading subtasks for Grade 4. The results for all three languages indicate that the data structure confirms two common underlying reading constructs: decoding and language comprehension. By focusing our investigation on Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, we go beyond the “anglocentricities” (Share, 2008) and monolingualism inherent in the theoretical base that informs the development of many EGRAs. This is important not only for programmatic decision making and impact evaluation outcome measure identification, but also for the development and definition of literacy metrics that may be used in the measurement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and other international development benchmarks.

Improving children’s reading and math at large scale in Côte d’Ivoire: The story of scaling PEC

This report focuses on the government-led process of implementing, adapting, and scaling the Programme d’Enseignement Cible (PEC) in Cote d’Ivoire, a remedial education approach to improving early grade reading and math adapted from Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). It serves as a case study into larger questions of how an evidence-based initiative can achieve progress toward national sustainable scale, with lessons that are transferable beyond PEC and Cote d’Ivoire.

Can the quality of a school be greater than the quality of its teachers? A case of early grade reading skills in Ugandan refugee context

INTRODUCTION. As highlighted in the 2018 Uganda Education Response Plan, reading levels in refugee host communities are way below the national average. Since the 2018 National Assessment of Progress in Education report highlighted some challenging areas to the in-service teachers, a possible explanation for the persistent poor performance of learners in reading may reside with the finding that many educators themselves lack an understanding of the linguistic construct. Therefore, an informed training for teachers in primary schools was implemented to help them foster learners’ reading skills. The purpose of this paper is consequently to analyse whether learners whose teachers participated in the evidence-based intervention have better reading skills than those whose teachers did not participate in the intervention. METHOD. To achieve this, a quasi-experimental pre-program/post-program design, involving 2 schools, 24 teachers (12 per school), and 297 learners (157 from treatment and 140 from control) from Palabek (Uganda) refugee settlement was adopted. FINDINGS. The findings show that the reading skills of learners whose teachers participated in the intervention significantly improved as compared to their counterparts. Particularly, learners’ reading skills significantly improved in the areas of letter sound knowledge, segmenting knowledge, and nonword decoding, and slightly in oral passage reading and comprehension, and English vocabulary. DISCUSSION. This study therefore supported the hypothesis linked to the Peter Effect - one cannot be expected to give what they do not possess and raised a need for the Ministry of Education and Sports to mandate sufficient and informed training of teachers.

From an African Oral Tale to an English Picture Book: Rwandan Teachers’ Experience with Online Translation of South African Institute of Distance Education’s African Storybooks

Research findings pertaining to language education and distance education point to the lack of online reading materials written in African languages and reflecting African contexts. Such a shortage is a challenge to literacy skills development in Africa. In Rwanda, although there are some graded readers to support the teaching of reading in Kinyarwanda, there is a shortage of enjoyable storybooks on which children can practice their reading skills. This paper contributes to addressing this challenge by investigating the partnership between the University of Rwanda-College of Education and South African Institute of Distance Education’s (Saide) African Storybook Initiative, which provides a website of digital storybooks in Kinyarwanda and other languages for early grade reading. Data were collected from 32 Rwandan teacher educators who participated in a workshop. Participants created online picture storybooks in Kinyarwanda, translated some from other languages and published them on the African Storybook website. The researchers firstly observed their activities during the workshop, then, all participants filled in the questionnaire and ten teachers were interviewed on opportunities offered and challenges encountered during the translation process. The key finding is that teachers’ experiences with translation revealed differences in story reading levels between the original Kinyarwanda folktales and English translated versions. They found special features of African agglutinating languages in determining reading levels, and foreignization of translated stories based on cultural clashes. Differences in length between the original and the translated stories were observed, as well as the specificity of English versions in reinforcing more critical thinking than the translated Kinyarwanda versions. The paper recommends teacher educators and translators to bear in mind that adaptation to African languages requires care and a high level of ability to maintain the meaning and moral lesson of the original tale and make it enjoyable for children. Translating and adapting stories from English into agglutinative African languages have implications for early grade reading interventions in African schools since children stories on African storybook website are available in more than 100 African languages.

Improving Arabic Reading Fluency: Results from Iqra, an Early-Grade Reading Intervention in Ras Al Khaimah

For over a decade, international assessments have shown that Arabic-speaking students score significantly lower in reading, mathematics, and science than students of other languages. Country-level analyses of students’ reading abilities have furthermore found large deficiencies in Arabic-speaking countries, which may contribute to students’ below-average performance in other subjects and international assessments overall. Together with cognitive psychologist Dr. Helen Abadzi, the Al Qasimi Foundation designed and piloted a new early-grade curriculum for teaching Arabic reading that builds on findings from linguistics and cognitive science. A comparison of students’ reading ability between the control and intervention group reveals a significant positive impact of the new curriculum, with students in intervention classrooms reading more letters and making fewer errors than their peers. The report underscores the importance of evidence-based design and evaluation of Arabic language teaching and suggests expanding the pilot program to a larger sample of schools across the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Future evaluations should control for student time spent on task, and consider external factors influencing language learning, such as measures of socioeconomic status and parental involvement.

Perceptual Enhancement for Arabic Reading: An Intervention to Support Fluency and Automaticity in Grade One

This study, conducted in the United Arab Emirates, piloted a curriculum to increase early grade reading fluency. A curriculum with enhanced perceptual features, such as font size and spacing was used with grade one students in four schools to detect any significant difference in students’ reading speed and reading accuracy after one year. Three hundred forty-five grade one students participated in the pilot—174 in the intervention group and 171 in the control group (ds= 0.33 0.47). At the end of the year, students in the intervention group read more letters and words correctly on average in one minute (p < .01) and in an entire text (p < .01 for letters; p < .001 for words) than those in the control group. These results suggest that curriculum with perceptual enhancement may be useful in facilitating early Arabic reading fluency.

The triple cocktail programme to improve the teaching of reading: Types of engagement

Background: South African-structured reading programmes have been implemented in schools in South Africa. The Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) is an education triple cocktail programme, which attempts to improve home language reading in a number of schools. Aim: The objective of this research was to find out how the educators involved in the implementation of the triple cocktail intervention programme enact the implementation of the lesson in the classroom. The second objective was to ascertain whether there were any effects in improving the teachers' knowledge and skills bringing about changes to their practice. Setting: The context of the study were four primary schools from the North West province that participated in the EGRS study. Foundation Phase teachers from these schools where the home language is Setswana were selected to be the participants of this study. Methods: A case study approach using an interpretive paradigm provided an empirical comparison of the effects of different types of implementation that can affect the outcomes of the programme. Foundation Phase teachers from four schools participating in the EGRS were observed in their classrooms and interviewed to gather data. Results: The Guskey’s model for teacher change was used to analyse the data, focusing on teacher change and the professional development of teachers. Conclusion: The results indicate that enactment of new approaches to early grade reading teaching can happen in four different ways. Teacher change occurs gradually and within a paradigm of mentoring and coaching.

Promoting effective early grade reading: the case study of primary teachers’ preparation programmes in Kenya

This study explores how the primary school teacher preparation curriculum prepares pre‐service teachers to teach reading in lower primary schools in Kenya. High‐quality reading teacher preparation is among the critical aspects that need to be addressed in order to curb the literacy challenges faced by early grade students living in low‐resource contexts. In this article, a case study of the Kenyan Primary Teacher Preparation programme is presented using data from the primary teacher education syllabus [PTES] and interviews of pre‐service and in‐service teachers from Western Kenya. Findings suggest that the pre‐service teaching programmes curriculum has limited content and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) critical to equip teachers to teach emergent readers from multilingual contexts. The curriculum content needs to be revamped to include more core literacy components and early literacy PCK, practicum apprenticeship specific for the needs of early grade literacy instructors, and content on early literacy formative and summative assessment. Suggestions and recommendations are offered on how to restructure the Kenya primary teacher programmes to ensure high‐quality reading teachers’ preparation.

Contributors

Contributors

A case study of innovations that address constraints on the effectiveness of early-grade reading achievement

The United States Agency for International Development, World Vision, and the Australian government established All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) to address problems that prevent children from gaining foundational reading skills. ACR GCD mobilizes the private sector, academia, and nongovernmental organizations in problem-solving dialogues that support the development, testing, and promotion of new solutions to these problems. It also advances EdTech innovation and research to improve reading outcomes for marginalized children in low-resource contexts to effectively build bridges over system constraints in ways that lower the risk of pilot-testing and eventual large-scale replication. This case study describes some of ACR GCD’s funded innovations and its nontraditional approach to employing grant competitions (in which innovators propose solutions to broadly described problems) and prizes (in which innovators develop solutions to specifically identified problems). For innovations that have been evaluated, this article summarizes the findings on their impact on learning.

Investigating the comprehension iceberg: Developing empirical benchmarks for early-grade reading in agglutinating African languages

Background: Reading development in agglutinating African languages is a relatively under-researched area. While numerous studies highlight the low comprehension levels among learners reading in African languages in South Africa, little has been done to probe beneath this ‘comprehension iceberg’ in terms of decoding skills.Aim: As a tentative step towards benchmarking in African languages, we analyse the sub-components of reading across three languages (Northern Sotho, Xitsonga and isiZulu), to better understand the nature of alphabetic knowledge, word reading and fluency in these languages, how these relate to one another, and how accuracy and speed relate to comprehension.Setting: Data was obtained from 785 Grade 3 learners across three African languages in three provinces in South Africa.Methods: The early grade reading assessment (EGRA) framework was adapted to the written features of the three languages to assess letter-sounds, single-word reading, non-word reading, oral reading fluency (ORF) and oral comprehension.Results: We present results on fluency, accuracy and comprehension and their interrelationships in these morphologically rich languages. While differences emerged between the conjunctive and disjunctive orthographies, strong relations occurred across the languages between letter-sound knowledge and word reading, word reading and oral reading fluency, and ORF and reading comprehension. Results suggest minimum thresholds of accuracy and ORF in each language, below which it is virtually impossible to read for meaning.Conclusion: There is a strong need for language-specific norms and benchmarks for African languages. Preliminary minimum decoding thresholds for comprehension found in these three languages serve as a move in that direction.

Large Learning Gains in Pockets of Extreme Poverty: Experimental Evidence from Guinea Bissau

Children in many extremely poor, remote regions are growing up illiterate and innumerate despite high reported school enrollment ratios. Possible explanations for such poor outcomes include demand – for example, low perceived returns to education compared to opportunity cost; and supply – poor state provision and inability of parents to coordinate and finance better schooling. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in rural Guinea Bissau to understand the effectiveness and cost of concerted supply-based interventions in such contexts. Our intervention created simple schools offering four years of education to primary-school aged children in lieu of the government. At endline, children receiving the intervention scored 58.1 percentage points better than controls on early grade reading and math tests, demonstrating that the intervention taught children to read and perform basic arithmetic, from a counterfactual condition of very high illiteracy. Our results provide evidence that particularly needy areas may require more concerted, dramatic interventions in education than those usually considered, but that such interventions hold great potential for increasing education levels among the world’s poorest people.

Predictors of Early Reading Acquisition in Children of Low Socioeconomic Status

Abstract The aim of the present study was to identify the predictors of early-grade reading acquisition in monolingual speakers of a transparent language. Eighty students attending preschool (M = 5 years, SD = 0.40), first grade (M = 6 years, SD = 0.59) and second grade (M = 7 years, SD = 0.55) in a public institution participated in the study. All were evaluated with the Early Grade Reading Acquisition test, an ad hoc sociodemographic questionnaire and the language domain of the Child Neuropsychological Assessment battery. Multiple regression analysis showed that phonological awareness and years of education are the factors that explain reading performance of children in their early years of school. These findings highlight the importance of improving oral skills prior to early reading acquisition and contribute to enhancing the early reading skills of monolingual children with limited socioeconomic opportunities.

Early Grade Reading Assessment for Primary School Students in Serang Banten

This article describes new strategies in teaching reading skills to primary school students based on the finding of Early Grade Reading Assessment instruments implemented in primary schools in Serang Banten, Indonesia. The authors describe the obtained results of the students’ skills in reading components. For example, we illustrate the proposed technique of teaching reading to primary school students. Our method shows that improvement in the students’ reading ability is moderate; the children are less able to recognize words; meaningless words are still hard to spell; and the students can understand the story well. The new strategy's effectiveness in evaluation is confirmed by calculating how the students recognize letters with a low reading speed of about 2.24 minutes for 100 letters. They could read 30 meaningful words in 3 minutes, but when reading something meaningless the students only read difficult 15 words in 15 minutes. General student reading was good at 86 percent, with only a few students who could not read the text. The students could understand 78 percent of the content of the reading by listening to the story and retelling the story orally. The children who were guided by parents or brothers or sisters had better reading skills. Another finding pertained to the availability of reading books besides textbooks for their reading sources. The new research results develop the students’ reading skills and can be used for developing the strategies in teaching student reading skills.

Orton-Gillingham Approach and Grade I Pupils’ Reading Ability

AbstrakThe main thrust of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Orton-Gillingham approach in the reading ability of Grade I pupils. Moreover, it proposed an action plan to integrate the use of the Orton-Gillingham approach in teaching reading. The study utilized the pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The pretest scores pairing with 24 respondents in each group determined the grouping of the respondents. Orton-Gillingham approach was used in the experimentation. Data were collected using the early grade reading assessment toolkit. These were administered in the two groups of respondents those were exposed to Orton-Gillingham approach from those exposed to Conventional approach (Marungko), respectively. Based on the findings, there is no significant difference in the performance between the pupils exposed to the Orton-Gillingham approach with those exposed to Conventional approach (Marungko). However, the research showed that those exposed to Orton-Gillingham Approach, twelve (50%) pupils performed as outstanding while eight (33.33%) pupils were outstanding using Marungko Approach. Thus, the Orton-Gillingham approach enhanced the pupils’ reading skills in terms of phonological awareness, appropriate spelling, retention, and better understanding. The proposed training and seminar program should be implemented to teachers for them to be able to utilize the Orton-Gillingham approach in teaching reading.