The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is a basic literacy assessment conducted in early grades. The assessment is conducted most often in grades 2-4. Since 2006, EGRA has been conducted in over 65 countries. EGRA was developed by RTI and is typically implemented by USAID, RTI and local partners (Gove 2009).

The assessment is a short oral assessment conducted with a child one-on-one. EGRA is designed to be flexible and adapted across countries and contexts, while maintaining core modules and similarities. EGRA is a timed test, enabling uniformity in how it is conducted. The tests often represent the most common features of the local language and align with the expectations of the grade level. EGRA includes up to thirteen subtasks, such as ‘oral reading fluency’, ‘vocabulary’, ‘diction’, and ‘reading comprehension.’ Multiple questions are included in each subtask to test proficiency. Of the thirteen subtasks, there are a few subtasks encouraged to be delivered across all countries and contexts (Dubeck and Gove 2015).

We compile and include data from the ‘reading comprehension’ indicator in EGRA from 48 countries _._ This indicator is available in nearly all EGRA data sets and is less sensitive to differences in context, implementation and language. It also and has a strong conceptual link to RSATs and ISATs (Abadzi 2008; Dubeck and Gove 2015) which also measure reading comprehension. To ensure robustness to language effects, we only include data when students took the test in their language of instruction. We use data for grades 2-4, which EGRA is designed for, although certain countries will participate out of this range. We restrict data used for our database to grades 2-4 to be consistent with the design of EGRA. We scale the EGRA microdata to a mean of 500 and standard deviation of 100. This scale corresponds to the scale used by RSATs and ISATs. We include all EGRA data from 2007-2017 as one round. This ensures our scaling is not biased by changing distributions of countries. In the future, we will consider new EGRA data as part of a future round and will conduct intertemporal comparisons using a similar approach to PISA (OECD 2015). Patrinos and Angrist (2018) provide additional detailed analysis and robustness checks on the inclusion of EGRA data.

The inclusion of EGRA adds 48 countries to the database with at least one data point in the past 10 years, nearly all of which are developing economies. Of the 48 countries, nearly two-thirds (31 countries) have data that is nationally representative. Linking functions for EGRA are derived using countries with nationally representative data only, to ensure the assumptions underlying the construction of the linking function hold. We include countries with non-representative data only when the alternative is no data. We include a dummy variable indicating when the data is not nationally representative to enable users of the database to analyze the data accordingly.

# _D. Summary of Assessments Included in the Database_

We include eight learning assessments in our database. Supplement Table IV summarizes the assessments included. Supplement Table V further describes the distribution of source assessments included in our database by country-level-year observations. Most regional assessments are done at the primary level. Moreover, regional assessments comprise nearly 40 percent of primary country-level-year observations, marking substantial representation of developing countries.

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