The Ministry of Education will be implementing the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) aimed at determining a child’s reading and writing ability in order to develop internationally agreed levels of performance.
At the opening session of the EGRA workshop, Minister of Education, Shaik Baksh said the piloting of the Assessment is key to the ministry’s efforts to combat illiteracy. The Assessment is a diagnostic instrument designed to quickly assess the foundation skills for literacy acquisition of pupils in grades one to three.
The Government Information agency (GINA) quoted Baksh as saying,
“If you don’t measure the children will move from one grade to another and nobody can hold the teachers accountable for results.” He said the ministry aims to adapt the instrument to suit the local context and ensure that all students from the said grades would be able to read before they move on to Grade Four. The instrument will be pretested in 60 schools in regions one to five, and Region Nine. Two consultants from Washington, USA will facilitate the process.
One consultant, Dr Jennifer Spratt who is a Senior Educational Develop-ment Advisor said the instrument is easy to administer and would require working with children for about 15 minutes. She noted that after each session educators can “have a good sense” of whether the child knows his/her letters; if he/she can read a simple paragraph; whether the child has trouble decoding individual words, and if the child has the capacity of basic writing skills. Spratt said the instrument builds on the state-of-the-art reading research that draws on US, European, and international literature.
“This work will help Guyana to take a look at other measures of literacy and how well they are able to respond to the international process of developing international agreed levels of performance,” she added. Spratt said too over the past months the ministry has developed its own assessment instrument. She said in working on the EGRA programme, as well as developing its own programme, Guyana will join a small group of countries that has begun taking steps to tackle the issue of scientific, systematic assessment of reading in the early primary years.
The instrument consists of eight sections: Letter Name Knowledge, Phoneme Segmentation, Familiar Word Identifi-cation, Simple Unfamiliar Non-Word Decoding, Passage Reading, Listening Comprehension, Dictation, and Student Context Interview.
