Image of three girls sitting at a school desk and pointing at words on individual learning materials marked "USAID."

Building Blocks for a New Education Landscape in Sindh .

February 25, 2016

A nuanced approach that targets learning materials, teacher training, instructional review, and an innovative formative assessment technique has the potential to reshape the way reading is taught in Pakistan.

“These are the children of our country. They are our children. If they are able to read and learn, our school will shine, our country will shine.” – Humera Sanam, teacher in Sindh

A baseline early grade reading assessment (EGRA) conducted in 2014 for 6,000 third-grade students in Sindh Province in southeastern Pakistan revealed a startling statistic. Of the children evaluated, 32 percent could not read a single word of grade-level text in Sindhi or Urdu, the province’s two main languages. After further research, one leading cause emerged: The majority of students in the province did not have access to textbooks and supplementary reading materials.

One solution might have been simply to create and distribute books. However, the people involved in the USAID Sindh Reading Program (SRP) decided to take a more holistic approach. In addition to new learning materials, they mapped out a multi-pronged strategy that brings together teacher training, institutional review, and an innovative assessment approach.

This initiative supports the larger efforts of USAID to meet a global education target of improving the early grade reading skills of 100 million children. It also supports the Sindh Education Sector Plan for 2014-2018, which aims to increase literacy from 59 to 70 percent and enrollment from 32 to 45 percent.

Creating and distributing new materials has been a big first step. Unlike previous attempts, these materials have been prepared with systematic precision, factoring in elements such as font style, size, illustrations, and number of words per page to make sure they are grade-appropriate. In December 2015, 120,520 teaching and reading resources were distributed to 1,460 schools in seven districts in Sindh. A total of 182,000 materials for grades 1-5, including readers, decodable stories, and read-alouds, have been distributed throughout Sindh since the project started in 2014.

The first type of material were readers — read-aloud and levelled formats — that reinforce foundational reading skills for children in grades 1 and 2. These readers directly align with scripted lesson plans for teachers, the second type of learning material that SRP staff helped develop. The lesson plans follow a specific scope and sequence — in other words, a framework that describes in detail the concepts students will learn at each point in the curriculum. In addition to applying phonics-based instruction, the lesson plans steer away from traditional rote memorization techniques and toward interactive modes of learning. Activity-based teaching motivates back-and-forth between teachers and students, as well as peer-to-peer learning.

“The use of sounds along with activity-based learning has greatly helped improve children’s reading skills,” said Humera Sanam, a grade 1 teacher from Sukkur District in Sindh.

The scope and sequence and the materials went through a rigorous vetting process — a new phenomenon in Sindh — by the recently established Materials Review Committee. The committee consists of eight representatives from the Sindh Textbook Board, the Bureau of Curriculum, and Government Colleges of Elementary Education. By involving these subject matter experts, SRP has essentially institutionalized a local mechanism of accountability.

“These are the children of our country. They are our children. If they are able to read and learn, our school will shine, our country will shine.”

Humera Sanam, Grade 1 Teacher from Sukkur District in Sindh

“The use of sounds along with activity-based learning has greatly helped improve children’s reading skills.”

Humera Sanam, Grade 1 Teacher from Sukkur District in Sindh

But once approved, these materials aren’t just sent to classrooms around the province. Rather, they are accompanied by trained teaching and learning associates (TLAs), who go to classrooms and assist teachers as they adopt the new scripted lesson plans and teaching methods. All TLAs are trained through a multi-day session so they can support up to 10 schools and 20 teachers in grades 1 and 2.

In the short term, TLAs help by giving real-time feedback on actions as they happen in a classroom. In the long term, the hope is that with the temporary support of TLAs and the new lesson plans, teachers in Sindh will learn new skills that will help them continue to use this teaching model in the years to come. In time, TLAs will no longer be needed because the workforce of educators will already be applying these practices.

In addition to these activities around materials development and training, the Sindh Reading Program has recently embarked on an effort to integrate formative assessments into SRP-developed reading curricula across the target districts. Formative assessments serve as a way to analyze how effective instruction is in classrooms, gathering evidence to improve how students learn and how teachers educate.

These evaluations are administered via tablets and can identify gaps quickly among different tiers of students and provide key information to help adapt future instruction. A diagnostic assessment was completed at the end of 2015, and the first round of assessments was done in February 2016, followed by a second round in April 2016, and conducted every four to six weeks thereafter by the TLAs in given grades.

The assessments are designed to identify nonreaders and readers by testing a variety of skills, such as letter name recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension. In this way, formative assessments are a useful tool for gauging a wide range of student performance, a common trend in a setting like Sindh where children’s skills can vary so much, even in a single grade.

120,520

teaching and reading resources distributed to 1,460 schools in seven districts in Sindh

182,000

materials for grades 1-5, including readers, decodable stories, and read-alouds, distributed throughout Sindh

“In Sindh, most of the teachers are aware of those students who are falling behind, but they fall under the assumption that just identifying such children is enough,” said Aftab Khushk, a student assessment advisor. “But after the introduction of formative assessment, teachers have started realizing that the course of instruction needs to be customized as per needs of the individual learner.”

At the core of formative assessment is the attitude that all children have the potential to learn. The emphasis is on incremental progress rather than success or failure. This mindset is playing a key role in morphing the approach that the education and policy community in Sindh take toward reading in primary schools. There is still a lot of work ahead, but the success seen so far shows that these activities have the potential to alter the entire landscape of reading in the province.