2020 Nepal Early Grade Reading Program (EGRP), Endline Study

The oral reading fluency (ORF) subtask measures how quickly and accurately a student can read. It is a core component of EGRA because it brings together lower-level reading skills (such as decoding and familiar word recognition) with how quickly and easily the student can read a given word (called automaticity).

Students are given a short, written passage on a topic that is familiar to them. They are asked to read it out loud “quickly but carefully” and are given 60 seconds from when they begin to read. The EGRA administrator times the student, making note of any mistakes the student makes while reading the words aloud. The score is reported as correct words per minute (cwpm).

The letter sounds subtask tests students’ ability to recognize letters and speak their corresponding sounds.

Students are presented with a sheet listing 10x10 grid of 100 Nepali letters and asked to read out loud as many as they can, as quickly and carefully as they can, in 1 minute. The EGRA administrator times the child and records the number of correct letter sounds per minute (clspm).

In Nepali, a matra is a unit of two letters that are combined with a symbol (such as an accent or other mark) that changes the sound of the vowel. Two or more matras combined form words. The matra subtask assesses students’ ability to quickly and accurately identify these units.

Students are presented 100 matras and are asked to provide the correct matra sounds in 1 minute. The EGRA administrator times the student, making note of any mistakes the student makes while reading the matras aloud. The score is reported as correct matras per minute (cmpm).

The nonword subtask tests students’ skill in using letter-sound connections to figure out (“decode”) words. While many students learn to memorize a broad range of "sight" words, they need skills to decode less-familiar words.

In this subtask, students were given a list of 50 made-up words that do not exist in Nepali but follow a typical spelling/sound combination of the language. This ensures that the student is not recognizing the whole word and must “sound-out” the non-word in order to correctly read it. The student was asked to read out loud as many words as they could, as quickly and carefully as they could. The EGRA administrator timed the student and recorded the number of correct words per minute (cnwpm).

Comprehension is the main goal of reading—understanding what is read. Comprehension is a complex task that requires some ability in all other reading skills.

This subtask is paired with the ORF subtask. Depending on how much of the ORF passage the student was able to read, the EGRA administrator asks the student up to six questions about the story. The EGRA administrator keeps track of the number of questions answered correctly. The reading comprehension score was the total correct answers, with a maximum possible score of six.