Global Monitoring Report 2014 Putting the Pieces Together in Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation Dear Friends, It is a great pleasure to introduce Room to Read’s seventh annual Global Monitoring Report. The pages that follow present evidence of the progress that we have made as an organization on several fronts. Following the lead of our 2014 Annual Report (Solving the Puzzle: Children’s Literacy and Girls’ Education1 ), I particularly want to highlight the progress Room to Read has made in our continued efforts to bring together the various elements of our work into an effective, comprehensive whole. Over the past few years we have brought together a range of once-separate program components, such as libraries and literacy instruction, to establish our integrated Literacy Program. This shift in program implementation requires a corresponding shift in our approach to measurement and reporting. Reflecting this shift, the structure of this year’s report has been updated to present a consolidated view of the results of our Literacy Program. The report’s structure also reflects our efforts to better integrate the components of research, monitoring, and evaluation. When deployed strategically, these complement one another: • Research enables us to tackle forward-looking, exploratory questions of critical interest to programs teams; • Monitoring tracks our activities and results on an ongoing basis, shows trends over time, and raises questions for further study; • Evaluation tells us whether outcomes are improving for children and whether Room to Read is responsible for this improvement. This includes our Reading Skills Evaluations—a highlight in this year’s report, as 2014 marks the first year we are able to report findings for every country where we have implemented literacy instruction. Each of these components represents an essential part of our strategy as a learning organization. As such, for each section that follows, we have reported our most important 2014 findings from all three areas of work. The Global Monitoring Report is one element of our commitment to being transparent about our results and to holding ourselves accountable to our global stakeholders. We hope that the strength of our results will encourage others to adopt similar approaches, so that we can all work together toward the systemic changes needed to promote lifelong learning for children around the globe. Sincerely, Dr. Matthew Jukes Senior Director, Global Research, Monitoring and Evaluation 1 www.roomtoread.org/AnnualReport/2014 GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Literacy Program 4 Program Outcomes 6 Program Reach 11 Monitoring Program Activities 13 Girls' Education Program 19 Program Outcomes 21 Program Reach 25 Monitoring Program Activities 26 Conclusion 29 Appendix: 30 Global Indicators 33 F R I C A About This Report A Tanzania Nepal Zambia Bangladesh Vietnam India I South Africa A S A Laos Cambodia Where We Work Sri Lanka GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 List of Figures and Textboxes Figures Figure 1. Total Children Benefited to Date 2 Figure 2. Average Words Read per Minute in Program and Comparison Schools 6 Figure 3. Average Words Read per Minute—Vietnam 7 Figure 4. Percentage of Children Reading for Enjoyment at Home 8 Figure 5. Average Number of Books Checked Out per Student 9 Figure 6. Percentage of Children Checking Out Books 9 Figure 7. Total Literacy Program Schools to Date 11 Figure 8. Total Literacy Program Schools to Date by Country 12 Figure 9. Teachers Receiving Professional Development in Literacy Instruction 13 Figure 10. Percentage of Teachers Conducting Key Steps in Reading Activities 14 Figure 11. Change in Library Ratings, 2014 16 Figure 12. Top Ten Most Popular Book Titles, by Publisher 17 Figure 13. Total Secondary School Graduates to Date 21 Figure 14. Retention and Dropout 22 Figure 15. Total Girls' Education Program Participants to Date 25 Figure 16. Girls' Education Program Participants to Date by Country 25 Textboxes Textbox 1. Testing New Ways to Track Children's Habit of Reading 10 Textbox 2. Evaluating Librarian and Teacher Training with the Reading Promotion Study 14 Textbox 3. Piloting a Protocol to Reduce Dropout Risk 22 Textbox 4. Rapid Assessment in Four Countries Highlights Program Benefits for Girls 24 GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 Introduction Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 1 Six years ago, we set an ambitious goal to improve educational access and opportunity for 10 million children by the end of 2015.2 As shown in Figure 1, we are rapidly nearing this goal: as of the end of 2014, more than 9.7 million children have benefited from our programs. As a point of comparison, that is more than the total population of Sweden.3 2 Room to Read. “Envisioning Our Future: A Roadmap for Learning.” http://www.roomtoread.org/document.doc?id=220. 3 The World Bank Open Data, http://data.worldbank.org, retrieved 11 August, 2015 GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 2 Our annual Global Monitoring Report helps us chart our progress toward this and other goals, presenting key results across the 10 countries where we work. Highlights of this year’s report include: • Our Reading Skills Evaluations continue to show that students in schools with Room to Read literacy instruction have better reading skills than students at other schools. • Our School Libraries Cross-National Evaluation showed that students in schools with Room to Read libraries are more likely to read for enjoyment than students in other schools. • The average number of books checked out by each child increased for the fifth consecutive year. This growth demonstrates that Room to Read libraries are getting better and better at strengthening children’s habit of reading. • As of 2014, our Girls’ Education Program has supported more than 30,000 girls to help them stay in school and build the skills to navigate key life decisions. In the following sections, each program—Literacy and Girls’ Education—is assessed in terms of its outcomes, its reach, and the activities that make up the program. The data and stories presented in this report are drawn from ongoing monitoring efforts in 2014 and from evaluations and research into our programs’ impacts on children’s educational outcomes.4 We share our findings with our program participants, investors, partners and the broader international education community. 4 For more information about our research and evaluation activities, please visit our website at http://www.roomtoread.org/measuringresults. GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 3 Literacy Program Our Literacy Program enables primary school children to become independent readers. GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 4 Literacy is not only the foundation of all future learning; it is fundamental for participation in modern global society. Yet nearly 800 million people across the globe—more than one out of every seven adults—lack the ability to read and write. That means being unable to understand every medicine bottle, employment ad or ballot form they encounter. Of all the illiterate people in the world today, two-thirds are female. More than 90 percent live in low-income countries. Room to Read’s Literacy Program is designed to address this challenge by transforming primary schools into child-friendly learning environments that enable every child to become an independent reader. We define an “independent reader” as a child who is able to read and does so regularly. Our approach includes working with schools to help them establish libraries with books in the children’s local languages, as well as ensuring that teachers and librarians are trained in the best practices of literacy instruction. By bringing these components together, our Literacy Program helps put children on a path toward lifelong learning. GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 5 Program Outcomes This section describes our 2014 progress toward our program goal to enable children to become independent readers, with both reading skills and a habit of reading. Reading Skills Children have more advanced reading skills in Room to Read program schools than in nearby comparison schools. GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2014 | 6 Reading Skills Evaluations In our 2012 and 2013 Global Monitoring Reports, we presented the results of evaluations underway to measure the impact of our Literacy Program on reading skills. We report children’s reading fluency, measured in words per minute, because this measure is a good indication of whether a child is reading fast enough to understand what he or she has read. Key to these evaluations is a comparison of our projects with similar schools that do not benefit from our programs, which tells us whether or not improvements in children’s reading outcomes are attributable to our work. This year, for the first time we are able to report first and second grade results for every country where we have implemented literacy instruction. The graphs on the previous page reflect the scores of more than 20,000 children we have tested as part of our Reading Skills Evaluations. Across diverse contexts, these evaluations demonstrate that children in Room to Read program schools read more fluently than children in nearby comparison schools. While the degree of improvement varied, Figure 2 on the previous page shows that this overall trend was consistent across eight countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Zambia. In each of these countries, students in Room to Read program schools showed statistically significant gains in reading fluency when compared to their peers in other schools. These successes are remarkable when compared with similarly focused education interventions around the world. In a recent review of 75 evaluations of teacher training programs in low-income countries,5 only two studies found a moderate or large effect of the kind seen in nearly all Room to Read evaluations.