Education Action Research in Eastern Indonesia

Dear Supporters,

In August 2024 we received support from the Education Office of Kupang Regency to expand our literacy program in Eastern Indonesia to eight primary schools. In an unprecedented partnership with us, they arranged to have twelve other primary schools act as controls.  Each SSM school was paired with one or two non-SSM schools in the same area to ensure similarities in language, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.  While still quasi-experimental at its roots, Timor Suka Membaca 2 (TSM2, project name) was as close to a small-scale randomized control trial as we might come.

The Activities
In short, your financial assistance made our data collection smoother more thorough, and the processing of that data much easier.  We were able to hire two research assistants, expand our interviews (teachers: 814, principals: 812, parents: 24 32), expand our data collection around socioeconomics, and pay for a transcription program that saved us countless hours.  

We are now in the stage of processing data.  The results are promising!  Here are some facts to help you understand the graph below: (a) most 1st graders in rural areas enter school without attending preschool or kindergarten; (b) “Control” means “no SSM curriculum”, “Treatment” means their class “received SSM curriculum”; (c) Every student was tested at the beginning and end of the year (baseline/endline).  As you can see, all 400 students are fairly similar in skill distribution at the beginning of the year.  By the end of the year, SSM students generally had more progress; original estimates are around 15% improvement over non-SSM schools!

Now we are working hard to process the qualitative data to understand the many factors and causes around those results.  We want to know what helped SSM succeed and what hindered it from making better results.  Most of all, we want to know how to improve the product to better help Indonesian elementary students learn to read.  

We believe that reading is one of the primary keys to thrive instead of survive, both for themselves and their communities.  Your support for our research brings us that much closer to our end goal in a way unprecedented in our company.  As always, thank you making all of this possible!