Adaptively Visualizing and Exploring Literacy Instruction in Kenya

The Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity is a USAID-funded program of the Kenyan Ministry of Education that has been running since 2015. It aims to improve English and Kiswahili reading outcomes among ~6 million children in grades 1-3 in >25,000 public primary schools and 1,500 APBET institutions (Alternative Providers of Basic Education and Training, a.k.a. ultra-low-cost private schools in Kenya's informal urban settlements).

A key driver of improved reading outcomes has been the instructional coaching provided to schoolteachers by government Curriculum Support Officers (CSOs). From 2015-2019 the CSOs have conducted nearly 500,000 classroom observations with associated feedback sessions. Data from those observations is visualized on Tusome's Tangerine Dashboard (http://tools.tusome.tangerinecentral.org/dashboard/index.html).

This project was an alternative rendering of the Tusome Dashboard developed using a subset (May 2018-July 2019) of the coaching data. It was intended to draw attention to key indicators of Tusome's implementation effectiveness while also providing a scaffolding that invites users with less experience consuming data into the process of deriving meaning from data.