Luminos Fund RCT results and interactive visualizations

Read our Year 1 Endline Report here. Read Luminos’s reflections on these results here, and coverage of the findings in Devex here.

Our team at IDinsight is conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Luminos Fund’s accelerated learning program for out-of-school children in Liberia, where more than one in three school-age children are not enrolled in school. Earlier we shared results from the first year of our RCT of the Luminos program, which showed that children in the treatment group were able to read four times as many words per minute and complete twice as many addition and subtraction problems at endline compared to children in the control group. We will return to study communities at the end of the current academic year to assess whether learning gains were sustained and whether children were able to successfully enroll in school.

In this post, we are excited to share interactive visualizations from the first year of the RCT, which allows others to explore the rich data that was collected for the study. These tools allow the user to visualize results across the 13 reading and numeracy competencies at baseline and endline, for the three groups (treatment children, control children, and government school children) and 100 communities in our study. We hope that these visualizations can be a resource to others who are interested in reading and numeracy outcomes for out-of-school children and primary school children in West Africa.

You can jump to a specific visualization by following the links below. For more information on how the subtask scores are constructed, please refer to the table at the end of this post.

1. EGRA: Treatment vs Control Group (Average Scores)
2. EGMA: Treatment vs Control Group (Average Scores)
3. Distribution of EGRA scores at Endline
4. Distribution of EGMA scores at Endline
5. EGRA – Change in Average Score (by Community)
6. EGMA – Change in Average Score (by Community)

1. EGRA: Treatment vs Control Group (Average Scores)

This graph shows the average scores for treatment, control, and government school children at baseline and endline for each of the subtasks in the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA). For subtasks that included a timed component, we show both the timed score and the untimed score. The maximum possible score on a subtask is included in parentheses next to the subtask name in the dropdown menu.

2. EGMA: Treatment vs Control Group (Average Scores)

This graph shows the average scores for treatment, control, and government school children at baseline and endline for each of the subtasks in the Early Grade Math Assessment (EGMA). For subtasks that include a timed component, we show both the timed score and the untimed score. The maximum possible score on a subtask is included in parentheses next to the subtask name in the dropdown menu.

3. Distribution of EGRA scores at Endline

This graph shows the percent of children who achieved each score on each EGRA subtask at endline.

4. Distribution of EGMA scores at Endline

This graph shows the percent of children who achieved each score on each EGMA subtask at endline.

5. EGRA – Change in Average Score (by Community)

This graph shows the average score on each EGRA subtask for each of the 100 communities in the study at baseline (denoted by a dot) and endline (denoted by a plus). The communities are sorted by the size of the average change in scores, from the largest change (at the top) to the smallest change (at the bottom).

6. EGMA – Change in Average Score (by Community)

This graph shows the average score on each EGMA subtask for each of the 100 communities in the study at baseline (denoted by a dot) and endline (denoted by a plus). The communities are sorted by the size of the average change in scores, from the largest change (at the top) to the smallest change (at the bottom).

Our results show that the Luminos program has large impacts on foundational literacy and numeracy skills for out-of-school children after ten months. Effect sizes are on the upper end of effects measured in RCTs of other remedial initiatives and structured pedagogical programs. We will conduct a follow-up round of data collection at the end of the current academic year to assess the persistence of these large learning effects and to assess whether students in treatment communities have successfully enrolled in government schools.

EGRA/EGMA subtasks