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1. Primary Education in Kenya
Engaging Lessons
Bridge brings new, engaging lessons aligned to the Kenyan 8-4-4 national syllabus to our classrooms on a daily basis. These lessons, designed by a team of Master Teachers and delivered wirelessly to classroom teachers, utilise strategies and activities that are proven to increase pupil understanding. For example, because poor automaticity is a barrier to understanding new concepts, we incorporate automaticity practice across all class levels in maths. For example, rapid automatic recall of multiplication tables ensures a smooth transition to more advanced maths topics such as operations using fractions.
Effective Learning Materials
Our materials, including textbooks, workbooks, homework books, and practical learning aides, encourage pupils to internalise and apply concepts to real life situations. In Early Childhood Education (ECE) classrooms, for example, pupils use flashcards to practice new vocabulary and benefit from engaging storybooks that introduce them to the joy of reading. Lower primary pupils use tens frames to develop a strong understanding of basic maths concepts, while upper primary pupils carry out experiments from the Bridge Science Kit.
Safe Environments for Learning
When pupils feel safe and supported in their learning environment, they are excited and engaged in school. At Bridge, corporal punishment is strictly forbidden. Our teachers and Academy Managers are equipped with a variety of behaviour management techniques that encourage pupils to correct their behaviour without any physical repercussions. Positive reinforcement of good behaviour sets the standard in the classroom and supports pupils to improve behaviourally as well as academically.
Accountability to Parents
Our parents have made the choice to send their child to Bridge, placing a great deal of trust in our Academy Managers and teachers. Our policy of no cash payments is one major way that we remain accountable to parents. Cashless payments protect parents by preventing fraud and ensuring that all the money they have paid goes directly towards training and supporting academy staff, creating effective lessons and learning materials, and maintaining the structure and grounds of the academy.
As Bridge strives to provide quality education for all pupils, we constantly ask ourselves, “How do we know that the Bridge approach is working? How do we continuously learn and improve?”
Every day, we collect data from the ground up to understand the current academic performance of our pupils, drive curricular and training decision-making, and assess the effectiveness of our work. A key part of these efforts is our annual EGRA/EGMA programme, which includes an impact evaluation study. We work in partnership with a third-party organization, Decisions Management Consultants (DMC), to measure the foundational literacy and numeracy skills of our pupils and their academic peers in neighbouring schools. We then track the same pupils over time to measure learning gains – both within Bridge and relative to other schools in the same communities.
There are three cohorts of pupils in the programme: the first cohort was first assessed in July 2011 in the greater Nairobi area; the second cohort was first assessed in February 2012 in four major urban areas across Kenya (Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Kisumu); and the third cohort was first assessed in October 2013 in several randomly selected counties across Kenya. This third cohort of pupils is representative of Bridge’s national presence and therefore serves as the sample for our impact evaluation study. Our most recent round of data collection in October 2014 aimed to survey these same pupils in order to measure their gains in one academic year. This paper focuses on the results of assessments conducted in 2013 and 2014, otherwise known as the 2013-14 EGRA/EGMA Impact Evaluation Project.
1. The Instrument
The survey instrument used in the impact evaluation project had three major components: 1) EGRA, 2) EGMA, and 3) Pupil Characteristics. Both EGRA and EGMA were developed by RTI in conjunction with USAID.2 EGRA is an oral pupil assessment designed to measure the most basic foundational skills for literacy in the early grades: listening with comprehension, reading letters and simple words, and understanding sentences and paragraphs. EGMA is also an oral assessment designed to measure pupils’ foundational skills in numeracy and mathematics in the early grades, including quantity discrimination, addition, subtraction, and solving word problems. Each of these foundational skills is tested with a different component of the assessment, referred to as a “subtask.” The final component is a pupil survey collecting information on pupil demographics, education, and home life.
2 Research Triangle Institute (RTI) developed the EGRA/EGMA instruments and have applied them in 16 countries and in more than 20 languages. They have been used by other implementing partners in more than 40 other countries and more than 70 other languages.
