Reading Fluency

The 2021 baseline EGRA showed that more than half of grade 4 students are reading at benchmark, which is 80 correct words per minute (cwpm) in the Kyrgyz Republic. However, boys trail girls with 60% of girls and 47% of boys meeting the national benchmark.

A similar pattern can be seen in the national benchmark results for grade 2.

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is the main goal of reading—understanding what is read—but it is a complex skill that requires many foundational skills.

Some USAID reading programs, including Okuu Keremet!, have started using an EGRA subtask called Silent Reading Comprehension to further measure reading comprehension. In this subtask, the student reads a passage silently to themself and then answers comprehension questions to assess their understanding of the meaning of the passage. The questions require the student to not only recall what they read, but also to make inferences based on what they read. The students are allowed to refer back to the text as needed to answer the questions.

The Okuu Keremet! baseline EGRA utilized the Silent Reading Comprehension subtask for the first time in the Kyrgyz Republic. When revising the EGRA for the 2021 baseline assessment, the Okuu Keremet! team removed subtasks measuring lower order skills, such as letter names and initial sounds, because the scores were already high in an EGRA conducted in 2018. The Silent Reading Comprehension subtask was added to better capture students’ performance on higher-order reading skills. This is the first time results from the Silent Reading Comprehension subtask are being presented on the EGR Barometer.

The 2021 baseline EGRA found that on average, grade 2 students answered 3 out of 5 Silent Reading Comprehension questions correctly and grade 4 students answered 3.2 out of 5 questions correctly. Both the grade 2 and grade 4 passages were grade appropriate.

Conclusions

The results described above suggest that students in both grades were generally more skilled in fluent reading than understanding what they have read. The Okuu Keremet! program intends to target interventions to support improved reading comprehension. They will do this by improving the quality of reading and math instruction in the primary grades, providing quality learning materials and activities (in and out of school), and strengthening the quality of system support provided to primary schools.

More specifically, the program’s interventions will focus on developing teachers’ understanding of how to build students’ explicit reading comprehension skills. They will do this through strategies that focus on vocabulary, listening comprehension, and overall exposure to a variety of types of text.

The program’s impact on primary grade reading outcomes will be evaluated at endline in spring 2024. The schools receiving the program (intervention group) will be compared against schools that did not receive the program (control group). This will help evaluate the impact of the program.

The baseline EGRA and endline EGRA also serve as nationally representative assessments of primary grade student achievement. To this end, the study will compare data that were collected in April and May of 2021 with data to be collected in 2024. The baseline-to-endline comparison will provide an opportunity to examine trends in reading outcomes in the Kyrgyz Republic over time.

Photo: Okuu Keremet!