Building Tomorrow

Mastering Comprehension: How to optimize curriculum for older learners?

Roots to Rise program

Overview

Location

Uganda

Schools

800 schools

FNL Focus

Literacy

Instruction

Remedial

Grades

P1 - P5

Who pays

Donor funded

Building Tomorrow’s signature FLN program is Roots to Rise (R2R), which builds on the Teaching at the Right Level methodology by contextualizing it to the Ugandan context. R2R is oriented to P1-P5 learners and is conducted in schools by BT-trained teachers, in community spaces outside of school hours by BT-trained Community Education Volunteers (CEVs), and through a low-tech phone-based numeracy platform, Ewaka, which was piloted and launched in April 2024.

R2R targets instruction to learners’ ability rather than age or grade and integrates Universal Design for Learning and social-emotional learning pedagogies to be inclusive and responsive. R2R has reached over 350,000 learners since 2022, including 179,903 learners in 2023. 93% of learners in 2023 advanced at least one learning level, 73% were able to read a paragraph compared to a baseline of 11%, and 33% were able to perform all four basic math functions compared to a baseline of less than 1%.

We currently operate in 22 Ugandan districts and have memorandums of understanding with the Ministries of Education, Finance, and Gender, as well as all districts of implementation. To support government uptake, we have seconded field staff as Technical Advisors (TAs) to local government offices. Three of five TA pilot districts pledged budgetary allocations beyond the project period, an indication of uptake.

Implementation research

R2R has proven to be generally effective at advancing learners’ literacy and numeracy levels over 40 contact hours of implementation. However, we have identified room for the program to be more effective at bringing P4-P5 learners, a population segment emphasized in our school-based R2R implementation, to minimum proficiency learning standards. In mapping R2R’s learning levels to the Global Proficiency Framework, we have found that over 90% of P1-P2 learners reach minimum grade-level proficiency and over 70% do so at P3, but this drops below 40% for P4-P5 learners.

We would welcome uBoraBora as a thought partner in identifying the mechanisms behind this shortfall, and as a research partner in testing solutions to adapt our model and increase effectiveness to this population.

Potential solutions that come to mind are adding contact instruction time for these learners, offering additional reading materials or enhanced pedagogical support, and/or building the capacity of facilitators.

We envision working with uBoraBora over a 12-month period as a thought partner to help structure our investigation of the issue and as a technical assistance partner to inform a sufficiently rigorous research design to test solutions. Grant funding would also be catalytic in ensuring our team has the resources to go about this research most effectively, while building our own internal capacity. If addressed, increasing R2R’s effectiveness for P4-P5 learners would be transformative in setting these learners up for success in later grades, and we are confident that adapting the approach for this segment will offer learnings and efficiencies elsewhere in our model as well.