Resetting targets

Jonathan Michael Bradley Stern · Benjamin Piper

Apr 2019 · RTI Press

Ebook

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About this ebook

This paper uses recent evidence from international early grade reading programs to provide guidance about how best to create appropriate targets and more effectively identify improved program outcomes. Recent results show that World Bank and US Agency for International Development–funded large-scale international education interventions in low- and middle–income countries tend to produce larger impacts than do interventions in the United States, as measured by effect sizes. However, these effect sizes rarely translate into large gains in mean oral reading fluency scores and are associated with only small increases in the proportion of students meeting country-level reading benchmarks. The limited impact of these low- and middle–income countries’ reading programs on the proportion of students meeting reading benchmarks is in large part caused by right-skewed distributions of student reading scores. In other words, modest impacts on the proportion of students meeting benchmarks are caused by low mean scores and large proportions of nonreaders at baseline. It is essential to take these factors into consideration when setting program targets for reading fluency and comprehension. We recommend that program designers in lower-performing countries use baseline assessment data to develop benchmarks based on multiple performance categories that allow for more ambitious targets focused on reducing nonreaders and increasing beginning readers, with more modest targets aimed at improving oral reading fluency scores and increasing the percentage of proficient readers.

About the author

Senior Researcher, Education and Evaluation

Education

PhD, International Education Policy and Management, Vanderbilt University

MA, International Educational Development, Teachers College, Columbia University

BA, Public Policy and American Institutions, Brown University

Connect

Jonathan Stern, PhD, is an expert in research and evaluation within RTI’s International Education division. He has over 15 years of experience in educational measurement and assessment, quantitative methods, research design, and program monitoring and evaluation.

Dr. Stern has provided technical expertise and assistance to education programs in more than twenty countries throughout his career, with an explicit focus on training and capacity building for project staff, ministry counterparts, and education stakeholders.

Since joining RTI in 2014, Dr. Stern has worked extensively in the education assessment space, leading efforts in the development and validation of Group Administered Literacy and Mathematics Assessments, as well as contributing to research and innovations in standard setting and benchmarking for early grade reading. He has also regularly supported projects in strengthening their use of monitoring and evaluation data and applied research findings for evidence-based decision-making about program implementation.

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