When assessing whether children can read, we should remember why reading is so critical, and why we should be concerned when children miss out on this critical skill. Everyone reading this blog had a moment in childhood when meaningless swirls on a page began to make sense. As adults, our ability to read benefits us in a multitude of ways, every single day. There is no doubt that our lives would have been diminished and constrained without it.

The profound importance of reading is reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal for education (SDG 4), with governments committed to ensure that all children are in school by 2030, and learning what they need for adult life. The emphasis is on the transformative power of education, with the ability to read – and assessment of that ability – a key ingredient in this transformation.

Oral reading assessments make it easier for all children to be assessed

A new e-book reviews one tool to measure early reading ability – the oral reading assessment – which is attracting growing interest from governments. Understanding What Works in Oral Reading Assessments, from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, draws on the first-hand experiences of donors, implementers and practitioners across 60 developing countries.

Oral reading assessments are conducted one-on-one with each child in order to measure, in essence, what that child is expected to know and able to do. Because children respond orally, any child can participate, including those who are not in school and those who are not literate, in contrast to pencil-and-paper assessments that require the ability to read and write at least some words.

The benefits of oral reading assessments

The e-book confirms that oral reading assessments have some advantages over international and regional assessments. They punch above their weight in terms of policy impact – being smaller, quicker and cheaper than major assessments – and operate in local languages. Such characteristics matter where assessment funding is limited and there are a number of languages in use. The results can usually be shared fairly quickly and can be used to ‘catch’ children who are struggling to read.

There are often many partners involved in oral reading assessments and they are not restricted to school settings: many are conducted by citizens in households to help fill gaps in the delivery of quality education. Through this collaborative approach, some oral assessments are developing family-support programs to help parents not just understand the results but use the information to strengthen the foundational literacy skills of their children and households.

Limitations of oral assessments

Oral reading assessments do, however, have their limitations. They are not comparable across countries or languages, so while they allow governments to conduct an assessment without fear of being ranked against other countries, they cannot currently be used for global monitoring. However, they may be used to establish local benchmarks as the international community develops a global approach to measuring reading skills in the early grades of primary.

We must also recognize that these assessments require significant human resources and time, and their open-source accessibility carries the risk that some of the organizations might not apply them correctly and come to the wrong conclusions.

Six recommendations

The e-book outlines six recommendations to make the best use of these assessments to improve learning:

1. Develop an assessment plan for comprehensive reform: Data from oral reading assessments should guide system-level reforms to improve learning. So right from the start, policymakers must clearly identify who will be tested, as well as the relevant knowledge, skills language level and perceptions or attitudes to be assessed.
2. Collect additional information: Sound interventions need information on the context of each child, as well as data on reading skills.
3. Emphasise relevant skills and be conscious of culture and language: Consider the foundations for pre-reading skills and recognize the specifics of culture and language.
4. Ensure good organization:  Teams need clear protocols that reflect best practice on logistics, monitoring throughout the process and follow up.
5. Share the results in the right way with the right audiences: Results must be understandable to key audiences, so that everyone has a stake in efforts to improve learning.

An investment we can’t afford not to make

There is strong donor support for oral reading assessments, but we need greater advocacy and better use of resources to translate assessments into better learning outcomes. We also need more knowledge sharing and dialogue on what works, and why, within and across countries.

Can we afford not to do this? A UIS paper published earlier this year argued that the benefits of good assessment data outweigh the costs of inefficient education systems. We maintain that oral reading assessments are examples of ‘good assessment data’: they can detect and address reading problems early enough in life to make a difference. Such early detection is essential, not just to reach an individual child, but for our collective ambition: ensuring that all children are learning what they need by 2030.