EnglishPAL Network
Last year saw the birth of the PAL Network’s new common assessment initiative: ELANA. An acronym for Early Language, Literacy and Numeracy Assessment, this new tool will assess early learning in language and numeracy for children between 4 and 10 years old. The project is being developed by three consortium partners, the PAL Network, Pratham/ASER India and ACER. Funded by the KIX initiative of the GPE, FCDO and Hewlett Foundation, the project is currently being implemented by our member organisations in 12 countries1.
ELANA is a continuation of the CLA movement and PAL Network’s previous assessment initiative, ICAN (International Common Assessment of Numeracy). As with CLAs, ELANA is conducted orally with one child at a time and does not assume that children can read. It is designed to be conducted in the household to ensure it reaches all children, not just those enrolled or attending school. Like ICAN, it consists of a common feature that will provide comparable data across the different contexts in which PAL Network members work.
ELANA builds on these characteristics but goes further. Firstly, it means an expansion in terms of the content. Compared to ICAN, ELANA expands the set of numeracy skills measured in 5 domains: Numbers, Geometry, Data, Measurement and Patterns. In addition, it includes a brand new language and literacy component, assessing aspects ranging from oral language to reading comprehension skills. The assessment will be implemented in nine different languages, following the rigorous and innovative process of item writing, review and translation-adaptation. The tool prioritises pre-primary and early primary grade competencies for children aged 4-10 years in both literacy and numeracy. This feature will enable ELANA to provide data about the learning continuum from pre-primary school skills to the acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy in developing countries.
Secondly, ELANA is a digital tool implemented using tablets and an application designed specifically for this project. The tool will leverage technology to make the data flow process more efficient than CLA paper-based assessments while reducing environmental costs. The final version of the assessment will also be adaptive, with tasks that are closer to the children’s learning level. This will allow for a better assessment experience and a more precise estimation of the children’s skills.
Thirdly, this initiative is also conceived as a scale-up of the previous common assessment initiative. With ICAN, we could produce representative data from one district in each participating country. For ELANA, we plan to provide representative data from three districts in each country.
After an intense year of assessment development, the first large-scale field trial was implemented in December 2021 and January 2022 across all participating countries. The field trial involved assessing over 600 children in each country to test the application, and the items designed worked in the field. The field trial results will provide vital information towards refining and developing the assessment.
Conducting a field trial of this scale in the global context was very challenging. The country teams have been up to the task in not only achieving successful field trials in terms of the number of children assessed and the quality of the feedback produced. But they also did well to ensure that established safety protocols were respected, and the children and their families’ health and safety protected. Even in these very trying conditions, we understand that the efforts we are undertaking will ultimately give the world a new tool that is vital to understanding the degree to which the pandemic is negatively impacting children’s learning around the world and ways of understanding and monitoring the progress made in reversing it.
