Can an Accelerated Intervention Close the School Readiness Gap for Disadvantaged Children? An Evaluation of the Effects of the LEARN Project’s Summer Pre-Primary Program on Literacy Outcomes in Northern Lao PDR

Developed against the backdrop of Sustainable Development Goal 4, as well as a global trend towards rigorous assessment of early childhood programs, this thesis answers questions about the effects of an accelerated school readiness intervention for non-Lao children in disadvantaged communities of Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Through a longitudinal, cluster randomized control trial, the study employs multi-level regression with an analytical sample of 391 children to examine the outcomes of a summer pre-primary program piloted from 2015-2018 by the Lao government with support from Plan International and Save the Children International in the Dubai-Cares funded Lao Educational Access, Research, and Networking (LEARN) Project. Research questions are investigated through a design in which the same panel of children are assessed against a control group at three intervals using the Measurement of Development and Early Learning. The thesis identifies significant associations between receiving the treatment and achieving higher gain scores on several emergent literacy tasks between baseline and midline, with effects roughly in line with similar interventions in other contexts. At the same time, the thesis finds that those effects had largely faded by endline. An interaction between treatment and ethnicity was only evident in a few instances, suggesting that the intervention may have boosted school readiness for Khmu children more by the start of grade 1 and for Hmong children more during grade 1. The thesis raises important recommendations about how to improve the fit between the ultimate objectives of accelerated interventions, the evaluations they undergo, and the needs of the broader education system. New contributions to knowledge are also found by interrogating a global assessment paradigm through a comparative linguistic lens, so that forthcoming evaluations benefit from the lessons learned based on LEARN’s attempt to fit a square peg into a unique alpha-syllabic, tonal Southeast Asian language

Furthering perspectives

Includes bibliographical references.Changing perspectives on repatriation / Christopher Green -- Use wear patterns on metate prior to and immediately following 20 hours of grinding / Ashley Packard -- Understanding the variation of Rio Grande ceramics / Rebecca Simon -- Post-mortem care warfare: can conflict between mandated autopsies and cultural expectations for post-mortem body care be resolved? / Joshua Clementz and Bonnie Glass-Coffin -- Born to be wide: a re-valuation of the claim that Neandertal skeletal morphology represents a uniquely derived condition / Chris Davis -- First-generation college attendance: the motivational process / Scarlett Eisenhauer -- Haitian disaster vulnerability as a coupled social-ecological system / John McGreevy -- Bringing it all back home: the re-localization of food and its impacts on community resilience / Mark Steinbuck