Project Objectives

Research objectives and questions to be addressed

There are and have been international surveys of educational achievement, but in developing systems with preoccupations about infrastructure, training and where UPE is perhaps an elusive target, insufficient attention seems to have been paid to assessing educational progress in the basics.

The over-arching objective is to explore the possibility of describing sequences of progression in educational achievement in primary pupils in the areas of numeracy and literacy. The extent to which it is possible to describe sequences having transferable currency in the geographical region which is our focus will be investigated. Such sequences may include criterion-referenced benchmarks likely to have broad applicability (perhaps even universal generalisability) across education systems. Equally, these sequences may be norm-referenced in terms of expectations of attainment and standards of achievement.

Download Pdf guides

Teachers Guide to Numeracy Assessment Instruments / 723kb

Teachers Guide to Literacy Assessment Instruments / 2.2Mb

Progress in Reading guidelines booklet / 1.2Mb

Progress in Reading posters - size A4 / 988kb or size A2 / 2.5Mb


The practical value of the research findings

This proposal is to conduct applied educational research. Providing teachers with the wherewithal to assess the accomplishments of the pupils they are teaching against sequences of educational achievement enables those teachers to target their teaching more effectively, to the benefit of the learning outcomes of those pupils. Communities are more likely to offer support for their children's school attendance and motivation when there is transparency and understanding of what it is that schools are attempting to enable pupils to accomplish. Education administrators are in a better position to identify problems and distribute resources equitably when they have reliable information about the system's outputs, e.g. with respect to socio-economic, gender or regional discrepancies in performance.