The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) measures students' progress towards reading. EGRA gauges early literacy skills through a 15-minute individual oral assessment of five fundamental reading skills. RTI worked with education experts to develop the EGRA in 2006, and it has been piloted and implemented in more than 40 countries. This volume aims to take stock of the substantial amount of information and experience generated through the use of EGRA, and to share this knowledge with practitioners, policymakers, and international donors. Chapters cover not only particular applications of the instrument but also put EGRA in the context of broader issues and developments in literacy and education.
Middle: Liberian teacher Patience Sieh, trained under the USAID-supported EGRA Plus project, leads a class in an early literacy activity. Photographer: Medina Korda, RTI International Bottom: Liberian students enjoy early reading materials provided by the USAID-supported EGRA Plus project. Photographer: Medina Korda, RTI International This publication is part of the RTI Press Book series.
Since 2008, the Ministries of Education in Liberia and Kenya have undertaken transitions from small-scale pilot programs to improve reading outcomes among primary learners to the large-scale implementation of reading interventions. The effects of the pilots on learning outcomes were significant, but questions remained regarding whether such large gains could be sustained at scale. In this article, the authors dissect the Liberian and Kenyan experiences with implementing large-scale reading programs, documenting the critical components and conditions of the program designs that affected the likelihood of successfully transitioning from pilot to scale. They also review the design, deployment, and effectiveness of each pilot program and the scale, design, duration, enabling conditions, and initial effectiveness results of the scaled programs in each country. The implications of these results for the design of both pilot and large-scale reading programs are discussed in light of the experiences of both the Liberian and Kenyan programs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.