Designing for Scale: Reflections on Rolling Out Reading Improvement in Kenya and Liberia (original) (raw)

Scaling up successfully: Lessons from Kenya's Tusome national literacy program

Many successful piloted programs fail when scaled up to a national level. In Kenya, which has a long history of particularly ineffective implementation after successful pilot programs, the Tusome national literacy program—which receives funding from the United States Agency for International Development—is a national-level scale-up of previous literacy and numeracy programs. We applied a scaling framework (Crouch & DeStefano; 2017) to examine whether Tusome's implementation was rolled out in ways that would enable government structures and officers to respond effectively to the new program. We found that Tusome was able to clarify expectations for implementation and outcomes nationally using benchmarks for Kiswahili and English learning outcomes, and that these expectations were communicated all the way down to the school level. We noted that the essential program inputs were provided fairly consistently, across the nation. In addition, our analyses showed that Kenya developed functional, if simple, accountability and feedback mechanisms to track performance against benchmark expectations. We also established that the Tusome feedback data were utilized to encourage greater levels of instructional support within Kenya's county level structures for education quality support. The results indicated that several of the key elements for successful scale-up were therefore put in place. However, we also discovered that Tusome failed to fully exploit the available classroom observational data to better target instructional support. In the context of this scaling framework, the Tusome literacy program’s external evaluation results showed program impacts of 0.6–1.0 standard deviations on English and Kiswahili learning outcomes. The program implemented a functional classroom observational feedback system through existing government systems, although usage of those systems varied widely across Kenya. Classroom visits, even if still falling short of the desired rate, were far more frequent, were focused on instructional quality, and included basic feedback and advice to teachers. These findings are promising with respect to the ability of countries facing quality problems to implement a coherent instructional reform through government systems at scale.

Reading Abilities of Learners in Public Primary Schools in Nandi County, Kenya

East African Journal of Education Studies

Reading is fundamental in the acquisition of language. It builds up an important foundation for the acquisition of other language skills and plays a vital role in the learning of other subjects. There is therefore a need for learners to acquire reading proficiency. The study sought to find out the reading abilities of learners in public primary schools in Nandi County, Kenya. The study’s research question was what are the reading abilities of learners in public primary schools in Nandi County, Kenya? The study sought to test the following hypotheses; There is no significant relationship between the gender of the learner and the reading ability of the learner in public primary schools in Nandi County, Kenya, and there is no significant relationship between the category of the school (rural or urban) and the reading abilities of learners in public primary schools in Nandi County, Kenya. The study adopted a causal-comparative research design with data being collected from a sample size...