Meeting Students in the Moment: Evaluations Track Progress After Return to Classrooms

Student Assessments are the key to optimizing the Open Books, Open Minds program

Imagine yourself as a student, returning to the classroom at the beginning of the school year.

Now, imagine it is not just any school year, but your first time back in a fully-functioning classroom, with all of your classmates, for the first time in three years.

To your right is a friend who did not have access to a computer, but did have parents helping with at-home worksheets and reading. To your left is a friend who had internet, but whose parents were gone each day working to support the household. Behind you is one of the lucky kids – she was able to return to her teacher and hybrid learning last year, giving her a slight edge as everyone adjusts to being back together.

A teacher moves through GLXi’s assessment process

Everybody is struggling to adapt and to get on the same page. It’s exciting, but also scary.

This is the reality for Guatemalan students who are back in the classroom, 100 percent on-site, for the first time since the pandemic disrupted life as they knew it. It is a pivotal moment, amid massive change and variance within the school learning environment.

Here at GLXI, we understand our responsibility in meeting these students in the moment. We have to determine exactly what they need to thrive, not only as individuals, but also as a classroom.

Our answer for this is student assessments.

While this might sound like a dry topic, student assessments are an extremely exciting process for us as a program. So we are eager to fill you in on this year’s evaluations!

Student Assessments measure reading ability at the start and end of the year in GLXi-supported classrooms.

In measuring student ability for grades one through three at the very beginning of the year, and then again at the end of the year, we can quantify our impact in the classrooms of Guatemala. And from there, we can adapt our program accordingly, to give these teachers and students exactly what they need — not just what some abstract educational model prescribes.

This is especially important right now, when students are emerging from the disruptions of the pandemic.

When these kids sit down at their desks, we want them to look around and see teammates in learning, and eventually, an even playing field. Through these evaluations, we believe we can get there.

A Snapshot of Students’ Reading Abilities

In Guatemala, educational restrictions were imposed for both public and private schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. These included distance learning, online classes, home-based assignments, and proportional attendance, among others.

When all students returned to the classrooms for in-person learning in February, we knew that it was important to take a snapshot of their reading abilities at that moment, so that we knew our starting point and could also measure progress through this important year.

Teacher-led evaluations are not just for students — they also serve as professional development

A second evaluation will be conducted in the winter at the end of the school year, and it will serve as our comparison point.

This not only allows us to help teachers help the students, but also identifies the areas that need the most focus, so that we can plan for how to adapt our methods and areas of emphasis in the future.

Teachers of first, second, and third graders were selected to collect data on students' reading levels using the "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, 7th edition" (IDEL) test.

They were responsible for evaluating their own students – as they have the most knowledge of the students’ progress, development, advancement and learning.

(By training the teachers on these evaluation tools, we were also contributing to their professional development – introducing novel topics and preparing them for the handling and interpretation of psychometric tests. What an added benefit!)

We also administered the evaluations to first graders, second graders and third graders who are not part of the "Open Books, Open Minds" program to serve as our control groups. Over time, this will allow us to get a better sense of the degree to which GLXi is helping teachers and students.

In total, 2,048 students were assessed. The evaluation process was digitized, to both streamline and adapt to new modalities in the future.

Interpreting the Results

First, we must emphasize: these early-year results are to give us a baseline for measuring future progress, and do not carry a lot of significance on their own. This is because students had just returned to the classrooms when the evaluations were conducted.

However, it is interesting to see GLXi students already showing modest gains over the non-GLXi students in the control group.

We saw a similar effect – and to an even greater degree – with our student assessments last year, which were conducted in October as students began returning to classrooms through hybrid learning.

GLXi students are back full-time in the classroom after a three year pandemic break

Our belief is that GLXi’s rapid and energetic pandemic response shows in those 2022 results. Students who had access to GLXi’s program – even while at home with formidable challenges to “regular” learning – fared much better than those who were at home for two-plus years with no formal educational support.

It is important to note that a comparison can’t be made between the two years.

The 2022 evaluations aimed to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning, identify weak areas for implementing new workshops and provide updates to teachers who graduated from the GLXi program.

On the other hand, the 2023 evaluations aim to establish an initial diagnosis of the reading level with which children are starting their first in-person classes after three years of distance learning.

Different students, grade levels, schools, regions and teachers were assessed in each sample. For objective comparisons to be made, these evaluations should be conducted within the same school year, with the same students, teachers, and in the same geographic regions.

That is our plan for the end of this school year, and we cannot wait to see the results! We are confident we will see the clear impact that the Open Books, Open Minds has on reading and writing learning. Stay tuned!