Assessing Early Grade Reading Skills in Africa: The EGRA Instrument

Primary school enrollments have increased significantly in Africa over the past decade, but results from regional and international assessments of academic achievement indicate that a substantial percentage of pupils have not mastered content knowledge. The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is a tool designed to assess how well children in the early grades of primary school are acquiring key reading skills, and if not, what areas of instruction need to be improved. The ability to read with understanding is one of the most fundamental skills a child can learn. Research evidence indicates that learning to read both early and at a sufficient rate are essential for learning to read well. Acquiring literacy skills becomes more difficult as children grow older, and students who do not learn to read in the first few grades are more likely to repeat and eventually drop out. Recognizing the importance of the early acquisition of fundamental reading skills, EGRA is designed to easily and accurately assess how well children are acquiring key reading skills. EGRA has been implemented in 36 different languages in 19 countries in Africa, serving two main purposes: to provide key decision makers and stakeholders with an overview of students' reading skills at the national or regional level, and to inform the development of reading interventions and assess their impact. EGRA results in Africa show that most students have not yet acquired a basic level of reading proficiency by the end of grade 2 (or beginning of grade 3) to allow them to transition from learning to read to reading to learn in later grades. In several countries, not only have most students not acquired a basic level of proficiency, but a large proportion is unable to read at all—a worrisome finding. The reading comprehension section of EGRA measures how well children are able to read and comprehend a short narrative text passage, targeted for the second grade level. EGRA surveys in Africa show that a very small percentage of students in the early grades in the region is able to sufficiently comprehend what they read. The percentage of students that reads with at least 80% comprehension was less than 4% in Liberia, Mali, and Uganda. In Ethiopia, between 0.5% and 13% of students could read with comprehension, depending on the language and region of the country. In The Gambia, the percentage of students who could read with comprehension at the end of two years of schooling—23%—was higher than in other regions and countries surveyed in Africa but still very low. The results of EGRA in Africa show that the vast majority of students tested cannot read with sufficient comprehension to learn and most are simply unable to read at all. Improving the teaching and learning of early grade reading skills should therefore be an urgent priority to enhance learning outcomes generally. Results from several successful interventions in Africa indicate that reading and learning outcomes can be improved if teachers are trained to teach key foundational reading skills and have the necessary materials to do so, children have appropriate texts to practice reading, time is devoted each day to reading instruction and practice, and teachers continually assess students' reading skills. Providing students with an opportunity to gain reading skills in their mother tongue, or a familiar language, is also key.