Results

Cumulative Effects on Learning

Mango Tree’s Northern Uganda Literacy Project (NULP) has had a cumulative effect on pupil reading outcomes from 2014 to 2016, including letters identified per minute, words read per minute (in oral reading fluency tests) and reading comprehension (following oral reading fluency tests).

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  • Scores demonstrate large gains in learning for pupils in the full treatment arm (where the program was implemented in a cohort of schools by Mango Tree’s field officers).
  • Significant gains were also realized through the half‐treatment arm (where the program was implemented in a separate cohort of schools by coordinating center tutors – CCTs).
  • The results of the program rank it among the most effective programs ever studied with an RCT in the developing world.

Impacts on Mother Tongue Literacy

NULP succeeded in substantially improving the teaching of literacy in early primary grades, resulting in children in treatment schools obtaining meaningful and relevant reading skills. End of year testing throughout the project’s implementation, from 2014 to 2015, demonstrates substantial reading gains for cohort pupils far above non-supported government schools which made up the control group. The following graph shows the cumulative effect on the numbers of letters per minute that the average pupil in each treatment arm could read by the end of Primary 1, 2 and 3 from 2014 to 2016.

Cumulative Effects on Letters per Minute Leblango

  • Effects sizes of NULP’s intervention compound after each year; by 2016, Primary 3 pupils in the full cost programme can read 50% more letters per minutes than pupil in non-programme government schools.
  • Graph above represents average scores, including students who were non-readers. When non-readers are eliminated from the graphs, the cumulative effects rise considerably for full cost and reduced cost programme schools.

Impacts on English Literacy

In Uganda, students begin learning English at Primary 4 and focus their early grades in mother tongue instruction. In 2017 after the NULP was already phased out, we measured the extent of strong foundation skills in mother tongue literacy affect skills in English. The RCT study found in addition to large learning gains in mother tongue literacy, the effects on English oral reading fluency, or words per minute, were almost just as large. The graph below shows the cumulative effect of the intervention on words per minute in English as they were measured in 2015 and 2016.

  • Learning gains in English persisted in 2017, even after the NULP had been phased out. Primary 4 students in the full treatment arm scored 0.26 standard deviations higher than control students in words read per minute in English. In reduced-cost program schools, the gains were 0.14 standard deviations in oral reading fluency over control schools.

Further Results

We’d like to thank the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) and our partner Mango Tree Literacy Lab for their on-going contributions to national literacy and primary education efforts. Our study is made possible by the generous support of DFID (Department for International Development) and ESRC (Educational Research for Social Change).

Below are additional publications and presentations from conferences further highlighting our findings: