Life-Wide Learning and Early Reading Development in Twelve African and Asian Sites
Author: Dowd, Amy Jo
Date: 2016-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Developing Nations,Reading Programs,Early Reading,Early Childhood Education,Home Study,Reading Ability,Literacy Education,Reading Materials,Reading Habits,Reading Achievement,Quasiexperimental Design,Comparative Education,Community Programs,Student Evaluation,Reading Comprehension,Reading Improvement,Hypothesis Testing,Multiple Regression Analysis,Scores,Statistical Significance,Effect Size,Achievement Gains,Intervention

For decades, the international education community has focused on schools as the primary vehicle of learning. However, learning assessments in dozens of developing nations show that repeated attempts to affect student learning in schools have largely failed. Because students with perfect attendance in low-resource settings spend less than 25 percent of their time in a classroom, even if educational quality is excellent, focusing only on school-bound factors is inadequate to optimize learning. This paper delves into the relationships between children's reading abilities and the enabling environment for learning in the context of Save the Children's Literacy Boost program. The authors conceptualize the enabling environment at a micro level, with two components: (1) the home literacy environment, represented by reading materials and habits at home, and (2) the community learning environment, represented by community reading activities. Specifically, the research hypotheses explored are: (1) At baseline, the enabling environment of the home, specifically reading materials and literacy habits, are positively associated with students' reading achievement, controlling for relevant demographic and school characteristics; and (2) At endline, the amount of community reading activities in which a student participates is positively associated with students' reading gains, controlling for baseline reading achievement and HLE, as well as relevant demographic and school characteristics. Data for this cross-country analysis comes from schools in Bangladesh, Burundi, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Malawi, the Philippines, and Rwanda where Save the Children and World Vision have partnered with teachers, administrators, and communities to implement Literacy Boost. The sample for this cross-country analysis consists of 6,874 students in grades 1-4 from 12 different Literacy Boost project sites around the world, including East Africa (Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia), South Asia (Bangladesh), and Southeast Asia (Indonesia and the Philippines). Approximately half of the sample in each site consists of students who attended Literacy Boost program schools, while the remaining students attended schools that did not receive Literacy Boost, thus serving as a comparison group for the study. The data comes from an experimental or quasi-experimental design depending on the site. In sites where an experimental design was used, clusters of schools were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Reading assessment, Home Literacy Environment (HLE) and background data were collected at baseline (prior to program implementation) and endline (at the end of program implementation). The results of this paper suggest that interventions should pay greater attention to home and community learning environments. Additionally, future research should aim to tease apart the impact of particular elements of effective life-wide learning interventions through a focus on collecting detailed implementation data, exploring reading skill development in low-resource settings qualitatively, and studying how home and community learning environment interventions differ in effectiveness across different low-resource settings. Two tables are appended.