The PRIMR literacy intervention had a positive impact on Kenyan pupils' literacy outcomes, including letter sound identification fluency, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and the percentage of pupils reading at the Ministry of Education benchmark, though not on all combinations of language, grade, and school type.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2015 · checked against its sources 2026-11-01 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? PRIMR improved letter sound identification fluency, oral reading fluency, benchmark reading rates, and reading comprehension in treatment schools relative to control, but not across every language, grade, and school type combination. → Piper 2015

Evidence¶

Piper 2015¶

Piper, B., Bulat, J., & Johnston, A. (2015). Reading Skill Transfer Across Languages: Outcomes from Longitudinal Bilingual Randomized Control Trials in Kenya and Haiti. SREE Spring 2015 Conference Abstract. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED562423

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Findings from the PRIMR randomized control trial, in which clusters of Kenyan schools were randomly assigned to treatment or delayed-control conditions and pupils were assessed with EGRA-based tasks in English and Kiswahili at three time points. The article reports "a positive impact on the literacy outcomes of interest."

"Analysis shows that PRIMR had a positive impact on the literacy outcomes of interest, including but not limited to letter sound identification fluency, oral reading fluency, the percentage of pupils who read at the MOE's bench mark, and reading comprehension, although not on all combinations of language, grade, and school type."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Communication Skills — outcome: instruction changes it
• Decoding — outcome: instruction changes it
• Reading and Language — outcome: instruction changes it
• Reading Fluency — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Longitudinal PRIMR data suggest pupils transferred literacy skills from English to Kiswahili, a direction opposite to that generally suggested by the Western literature. — related
• Despite greater expense and improved access to reading materials, pupil e-readers produced smaller oral reading fluency gains than either tablet intervention — related
• All three PRIMR ICT interventions (TAC tutor tablets, teacher tablets, and pupil e-readers) produced statistically significant literacy gains over the control group in grade 2 — related
• The ToTAL intervention in Haiti had a positive impact on the foundational skills of initial sound identification and letter sound identification, though not on all combinations of language and grade. — related
• The TAC tutor tablet intervention was by far the most cost-effective of the three PRIMR ICT interventions — related
• The impacts of the three PRIMR ICT interventions were not statistically significantly different from one another — related
• Frequency of TAC tutors' classroom visits was positively associated with learning outcomes, though the relationship is noncausal — related
• Previous non-longitudinal analyses of the PRIMR dataset reported statistically significant impacts on English and Kiswahili outcomes, with impacts ranging from .3 to .5 standard deviations. — related
• PRIMR increased the percentage of pupils meeting the Ministry of Education's oral reading fluency benchmarks after one year — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• PRIMR's first-year effects on reading comprehension were positive but inconsistent across language, grade, and school type — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• One year of PRIMR produced statistically significant gains in oral reading fluency in grade 1 formal and nonformal schools and grade 2 nonformal schools, in both English and Kiswahili, but not in grade 2 formal schools — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• The authors caution that PRIMR's first-year effects may not generalize beyond the study's disproportionately peri-urban setting — related