Literacy Boost (LB)

Thursday 18 September 2014

Literacy Boost (LB) is Save the Children’s innovative basic education strategy designed to respond to the alarming global learning crisis call that more than a third of all primary-school age children around the world (or 250 million 5-to-12-year-olds) cannot read or write, whether they are in school or not despite the fact that more children were enrolled in school today than ever before. Literacy Boost is designed to help kids – especially the most vulnerable groups – stay in school and learn both inside and outside the classroom

Tsion Desalegn, nine years old is in third grade at Dongolat primary first cycle school in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Save the Children built and furnished Dongolat primary school.

LB improves children’s literacy skills by focusing on key skills namely concept about print, letter knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, accuracy and comprehension. It has three components;

  • Assessment: measuring children’s reading skills to see how well they know their ABCs, sounds, words and letters, and read and understand sentences.
  • Teacher Training: training teachers to build their capacity in helping children crack the code of reading, keep students engaged and interested in reading books, and use games, songs and stories in literacy lessons.
  • Community Action: Getting communities involved in learning by providing books, libraries and supplies; sponsoring camps, “reading buddies,” and other learning activities; and organizing workshops to help parents support their children’s learning and to create books with locally available materials.

In a response to the assessment findings, Save the Children began piloting LB at 15 schools supported through sponsorship-fund in 2010 in Dendi District, West Showa. Encouraged by the positive results, Save the Children decided to scale-up the Literacy Boost program to the Tigray Field Office (TFO) in 2012 targeting 54 schools supported through sponsorship-funds and the Save the Children Italy’s Basic Education Integrated with Food Security Project. Impressive reading improvement among children participating in Save the C-supported LB schools attracted the attention of Tigray Regional Education Bureau (TREB) experts to scale-up LB program throughout the region. The bureau has trained 13,428 first cycle primary school (grade 1-4) teachers across the region. These teachers have reached more than 600,000 children in about 2,000 primary schools. The regional experts were so enthusiastic that LB will add value in improving the quality of primary education.

The endline LB evaluation result conducted in 2014 after three years of implementation revealed significant improvements in key literacy skill areas of Grade three students. Students have mastered concepts about print and have nearly done so with the most used words with a significant increase from 65% correct and 61% correct during baseline to 97% correct and 93% correct, respectively. Average scores in letter knowledge have increased significantly from 48% during baseline to 79%. Similarly, the proportion of readers has also significantly increased from 70% during baseline to 93%, and among these students’ fluency and accuracy scores have increased from 23 to 44 words per minute correctly read and from 66% to 89%, respectively. However, students still need help with reading comprehension, which has not improved as much. Although average scores have increased from 46% to 63% question correct, still only 20% of students meet the ultimate target of being ‘readers with comprehension.

All in all, more than half a million children in Tigray region are expected to benefit from LB by the end of 2013/14 Ethiopian academic year. Save the Children will continue to work in scalingup Literacy Boost in Oromia Regional State as well as across the country.