Category Archives: Early-grade reading assessment

Focus on our SDG 4 Data Digest Partners: Conférence des Ministres de l’Éducation des États et Gouvernements de la Francophonie (CONFEMEN)

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By Hilaire Hounkpodoté, PASEC Coordinator

The recent SDG 4 Data Digest illustrates the range of partners working with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to help countries produce and use assessment data to strengthen lifelong learning. This blog highlights the work of one of these vital partners: the Conférence des Ministres de l’Éducation des États et Gouvernements de la Francophonie (CONFEMEN). CONFEMEN works with the world’s French-speaking countries to implement the Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC), a renowned regional learning assessment.

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Focus on our SDG 4 Data Digest Partners: RTI International

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By Luis Crouch, Chief Technical Officer, and Amber Gove, Director of Research, RTI International

The recent edition of the SDG 4 Data Digest illustrates the range of partners working alongside the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to help countries produce and use assessment data to strengthen lifelong learning. This blog highlights the work of one of these vital partners: RTI International, which aims to improve the human condition by turning research knowledge into practice. RTI International’s contribution to the SDG 4 Data Digest provided expert analysis on reading and mathematics assessments for children in the early grades of school.

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A Partnership for a Global Public Good: Data to Improve Learning

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Girindre Beeharry, Director of the Global Education Learning Strategy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Emily Woolf, Senior Education Adviser, UK Department for International Development (DfID)

With 617 million children and adolescents worldwide unable to read a simple sentence or handle a basic math calculation, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) has embarked on an initiative to link existing international, regional and national assessments to fill a critical data gap on learning during the early grades of education. Continue reading →

Focus on our SDG 4 Data Digest Partners: Early Childhood Education and the Offord Centre for Child Studies

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By Magdalena Janus, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences (McMaster University), Offord Centre for Child Studies

The recent edition of the SDG 4 Data Digest illustrates the range of partners working alongside the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to help countries produce and use assessment data to strengthen lifelong learning. This blog highlights one of these vital partners: the Offord Centre for Child Studies, and specifically Professor Magdalena Janus, who brought years of expertise to the Digest’s analysis on early childhood development (ECD). Here, Magdalena shares her thoughts on the critical importance of measuring early learning.

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We Are Ready to Start Monitoring Early-grade Learning

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
This blog was also published by the Global Education Monitoring Report

Young learners have moved up the data agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 4! The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and its partners have been pushing to upgrade SDG 4 Indicator 4.1.1a on measuring learning outcomes in Grades 2 and 3, and earlier this week we heard that our efforts have been successful. Continue reading →

Educational Prosperity: Looking Beyond Equality to Equity

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By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc

The educational prosperity framework that I introduced in a recent blog provides an essential structure for understanding the holistic and cumulative ways that children develop, learn and thrive. The benefits of the framework are hardly theoretical: they provide an important and practical guide for ways that monitoring data can—and should—be used to create smarter and more effective policies to help young people thrive.  Continue reading →

The Educational Prosperity Framework: Helping Countries Provide Foundational Learning for All

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By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc

To honour World Teachers Day, this blog presents an assessment framework, called Education Prosperity, that can be used to track the success of teachers, families, communities and public institutions in developing children’s cognitive skills and their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. Continue reading →

Learning Progression Explorer: Tell Us What You Think

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By Ray Adams, Director of ACER’s Centre for Global Education Monitoring and a Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

The push for globally-comparable measures of learning is truly underway, with work well advanced through the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) to develop common metrics to benchmark student performance in reading and mathematics. The development of common metrics is fundamental to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): ensure inclusive and quality education for all by 2030. Common metrics are crucial if we are to obtain a comprehensive and comparable picture of how well children are learning what they need to learn – the ‘quality’ part of the SDG 4 equation. Continue reading →

A Pragmatic and Unified Approach to Measure Learning Globally

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

This blog was also published by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

Last month saw a major leap forward on the global reporting of learning outcomes – on which children are learning, which children are not learning, and why.

At a meeting convened by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in Washington D.C. on June 26, partners representing regional and international learning assessments, as well as development partners, pledged to move forward together to tackle the pressing need for comparable data on learning outcomes at the global level. Continue reading →

Monitoring Reading and Writing to Help Children Climb the Ladder of Education

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By Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

This piece was also published by the Global Reading Network.

In his short story “Instructions to climb a ladder,” Julio Cortazar uses more than 380 words to explain an action that, you would think, requires no explanation at all. He writes, for example: “The first steps are always the most difficult, just to acquire the coordination needed.” He also notes the coincidence of the raising of “the foot” and “the foot” of the ladder.

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