Join us for a webinar marking 18 years of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), a now widely used tool for assessing foundational literacy skills in the early grades. The presentation will provide an overview of EGRA’s development, including its birth, technical foundations and adaptability to various linguistic and country system contexts. Over the past (nearly) two decades, EGRA has been used in over 75 countries and 125 languages, to measure essential reading skills such as phonemic awareness, letter recognition, and reading fluency. EGRA data has been used to inform policies and programs designed to improve early literacy skills and outcomes. The presentation will also discuss how this open-source tool has evolved into a new standard in education policy analysis that has been taken up by the World Bank, GPE, USAID, FCDO, and other global, regional, and national organizations.
The presentation will share some of the key lessons from EGRA implementations over the years, highlight how it is being used in education research, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and what evidence there is regarding its impact on raising awareness regarding literacy outcomes in diverse educational systems. In addition, the presentation will address EGRA’s role in enabling efforts to measure and enhance Learning Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS), linking literacy improvements to broader educational development and the objective of reducing learning poverty. Looking to the future, the presentation will outline emerging priorities for EGRA (and its younger sister EGMA, the Early Grade Mathematics Assessment), including digital adaptations and its ongoing relevance in addressing global challenges in foundational learning. In sum, this seminar will provide a concise look at the contributions of EGRA and EGMA to the movement to improve foundational learning and their potential to further advance education systems and education policy globally.
Speaker:
Amber Gove, PhD is a Fellow and Director at RTI International, an independent, non-profit research institute dedicated to improving the human condition. In this role she provides technical assistance to research and implementation projects and consolidates learning from RTI’s efforts to improve education outcomes for children around the world. She currently serves as the project manager for USAID’s Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Education Fund and Guatemala’s Basic Education Quality and Transitions Activity. Since joining RTI in 2005, much of her work has been on the development and deployment of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), a system-level diagnostic for understanding students’ foundation skills in reading. Her research and policy interests include the improvement and measurement of student learning, education finance, conditional cash transfer programs, and factors affecting achievement, enrollment, and attendance.
Dr. Gove regularly engages with international organizations and ministry counterparts in policy dialogue around system strengthening, early learning and assessment. She is a member of the technical advisory group for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics’ Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML) and UNICEF’s Foundational Skills Module revision. She served as Treasurer of the Comparative and International Education Society from 2018-2021 and has been an invited speaker at Brookings, Global Campaign for Education, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, UK Department for International Development (DfID), and other events. Her publications include The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and Interventions to Improve Basic Literacy, Early Grade Reading: Igniting Education for All as well as numerous journal articles. She received her PhD in International Comparative Education and Master’s in Economics from Stanford University, is a native English speaker and is professionally fluent Spanish and Portuguese.
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