Photo of Room to Read pilot in Tanzania
Room to Read (Christine Beggs and Ryan Hebert) recently shared their experience with developing a comprehensive life skills assessment with the BEC M&E Working Group. The presentation outlined a multi-country process to develop and refine an assessment that measures knowledge, attitudes and skills across nine discrete life skills. In addition to discussing their approach to contextualizing the assessment, Room to Read presented findings from pilot testing across five countries in Asia and Africa, including results of reliability and validity testing. Room to Read also discussed strategies they have employed to mitigate several different types of biases which are typical challenges with these types of measures.
Following the presentation, the group discussed strategies for testing psycho-social measures across contexts and the specific challenges of measuring life skills including discerning between inherent traits and learned skills and dealing with cultural norms that influence the interpretation of results. You can learn more about Room to Read’s work in this area in this 2017 blog post, which profiles a pilot test of the assessment in Cambodia.
Room to Read's PDF of presentation here