Literacy Boost in Rwanda: Impact evaluation report

In Rwanda, Literacy Boost is part of the Advancing the Right to Read Programme, which aims to ensure that all children leave school with solid foundations in literacy. To provide more rigorous analysis and a stronger evidence base concerning the effectiveness of Literacy Boost, SC collaborated with researchers from Stanford University, in partnership with the Rwanda Education Board, to conduct a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) of Literacy Boost in Rwanda. An RCT is generally considered to be the most effective way to determine the impact of an intervention on outcomes of interest. Literacy Boost in Rwanda’s RCT randomly assigned all sectors within one Rwanda district to one of two treatment groups—Teacher Training only (referred to as TT), Teacher Training combined with Community Action activities (referred to as LB) — or a Control group. Creating these three groups helped to answer two high-level questions:

1) Does Teacher Training alone have a positive impact on students’ learning?

2) Do community activities positively impact student’s learning, over and above Teacher Training?

The study found that the answer to both questions is yes. In particular, involving families and communities creates greater numbers of readers who read fluently and with comprehension than simply training teachers alone. This report presents the results of a mixed-methods study evaluating the impact of assignment either to Teacher Training or to Literacy Boost as compared with assignment to a Control group on children’s learning outcomes. The report uses advanced statistical methods to isolate the effect of TT and LB on learning outcomes and qualitative methods to explore the impact in greater depth. The report concludes with a general discussion of findings and recommendation for action and future research.