Kristen Anderson, one of our program coordinators in Guatemala, recently took this photo of a group of elementary school students taking a test. The test was part of a pilot program we’re working on to gauge the success of our reading programs. We see the positive effects of our programs every day, (as do communities throughout rural Guatemala which regularly approach us for help training local teachers and getting books into classrooms). But perfecting our programs requires concrete study, which we’re working on now.

Here’s a report from Kristen, who is developing the pilot program:

“I recently decided to try to get a gauge on the impact of our reading programs on the schools where we are implementing them vs. the schools where we are not. I put together an assessment test for students in grades 1-6 to measure three areas: 1) motivation to read, 2) vocabulary and 3) comprehension. I gave the tests to students in three different schools. One school, ‘Aguas Escondidas’, has not yet received our programs, and will not until next year. This group will be the control group that we measure the improvement against the other two schools. The next school, ‘Melotto’, has been receiving weekly reading classes for almost two years now, and the teachers are now getting training on how to implement these techniques in their classrooms. ‘Centro America’ is the third school, and has only been receiving our instruction for one year.

I gave the tests to 547 students in total and have tabulated the data. The overall message I got from the results is that, regardless of the school, their motivation to read is high, but their comprehension skills are low. On a 100 point scale, all the motivation scores were 83% and above. This indicates to me that there is a large desire on the part of these students to become better readers. The sad and shocking part was that some classes scored as low as 13% on their comprehension scores. Guatemala pedagogy focuses on rote memorization. Children are taught to copy from a blackboard and memorize, but not to engage with content. When asked a simple question like, “How did the story end?” I had several students who simply copied the last two lines of the text, which contained no information about the culmination of the story, but was literally how the story ended. It is clear that there is a strong need for our programs that focus on getting students to engage with text, make predictions, use their imagination, and make associations to their own lives. Their motivation provides fertile ground for lots of growth.