February 23, 2022
At the Global Disability Summit 2022, All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) announced a new collaboration with the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) to develop a technical brief providing a framework and guidance that helps funders, implementers and researchers make their learning assessments more inclusive of children with disabilities and to measure their learning outcomes more validly and reliably.
Many countries have invested considerable efforts to increase access to and the quality of education for children with disabilities, but a myriad of challenges remain to reach that goal. In many high-income countries, learners with disabilities are allowed accommodations during assessments that enable them to access the content and demonstrate their true aptitude or achievement level. However, a recent review of learning assessments by the World Bank revealed that learners with disabilities were largely excluded from assessments in low-income contexts.
With global priorities like Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, appropriate assessment tools are critical to ensure the full participation and success of children with disabilities.
Recognizing their unique experience in advising projects and evaluators to include learners with disabilities in assessments, the GEC and ACR GCD are collaborating to spearhead the development of this important technical brief. The collaboration will engage funders, implementers and researchers to ensure that a range of experiences contribute to the technical framework and guidance.
GEC, which is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has worked to transform the lives of the world’s most marginalized girls – including girls with disabilities – through quality education and learning. GEC projects and their External Evaluators conduct formative and summative evaluations that include measurement of literacy and numeracy outcomes through commonly applied tools such as Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRA), Secondary Grade Reading Assessments (SeGRA), Early Grade Mathematics Assessments (EGMA), Secondary Grade Mathematics Assessments (SeGMA) and Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) assessments.
ACR GCD, a partnership of USAID, World Vision and the Australian Government, has grown to be one of the largest innovation funds for inclusive education. Projects focusing on increasing literacy for children with disabilities have spurred the development of some of the first adapted assessments in braille and sign language in several underserved languages and scaling of the sustainable production of accessible books and sign language materials. ACR GCD is also coordinating the development of Minimum Standards for Sign Language Storybook production in low-resource contexts.
The technical brief will be presented during a roundtable event in mid-2022. Watch this space for updates.
If you or your organization has developed inclusive assessments for early grade literacy and/or numeracy assessments with accommodations or modifications for learners with disabilities, we encourage you to contact us.
