The Saya Suka Membaca ("I Love Reading") program is designed to enable primary school teachers to teach reading effectively and to impart a love of reading to the children they serve. Because we are committed to making our program as impactful as possible, we have commissioned a volunteer researcher to evaluate the effectiveness of our curriculum in the field. This project will produce recommendations that will enable us to increase the impact of SSM as we serve communities across Indonesia.
The Saya Suka Membaca program has undergone several major updates since its inception 13 years ago. It was last externally evaluated in 2019. We would like to run a new third-party evaluation in order to assess: (a) the effectiveness of the SSM program as compared to the national curriculum; (b) external factors that help or hinder literacy education in the Eastern Indonesia; (c) implementation factors that help or hinder the students' literacy education.
This project has been designed to answer the questions above using a mixed methodology. Quantitative analysis of baseline/endline testing data will measure improvement of students' reading skill in experimental and control groups. This data will be triangulated against qualitative data related to program implementation (school factors), and socioeconomic and health factors (home factors) to accurately assess SSM's impact in Kupang, NTT and identify opportunities for improvement.
A 2019 evaluation measured a 54% greater increase in basic literacy skills for grade 1 students taught with the SSM curriculum compared to those in control schools. Through this research we will: (a) continue to improve our innovative phonics-based curriculum to better meet students' needs; (b) improve the training and in-class support we provide to teachers, transforming literacy education in Indonesia; and (c) create a valuable new data set to enable wider literacy research in Indonesia.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
