TITLE:
Comparative Analysis of the Literacy and Numeracy Assessment for Children in Daadab Refugee Camp in Kenya
AUTHORS:
Samuel Mburu, Lucy Tengeye, Sarah Mukisa, Gladys Agola, Jane Maweu
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19, Literacy, Numeracy, Refugees, Digital Learning
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.15 No.2,
February
22,
2024
ABSTRACT: Getting marginalized and vulnerable refugee children back into learning,
in physical school facilities when it is safe to do so; helping ensure that
children who are unable to return to school receive contextually appropriate
and operationally feasible learning was challenging, due to the impact of COVID-19
pandemic on education that left many children in refugee camps vulnerable
because their parents could neither afford home-schooling nor online classes. COVID-19
left many children in Dadaab refugee camp vulnerable. Parents could not afford
home-schooling and on-line classes for them. To compensate the lost learning of
children aged 7 - 10
years during the pandemic, Save the Children (SC) in Kenya introduced digital
learning in the camp aimed to improve their literacy and numeracy skills. The evaluation was for the pilot digital learning
project, implemented for a period of one year. The purpose was to assess the
contribution of digital learning on learning outcomes of children. A
quasi-experimental design was used where 320 learners were assessed using three
standard tools; numeracy and literacy boost and IDELA tools. Children from the
intervention schools performed better than the control schools in literacy
boost. However, the grand mean score achieved by them is still below average.
Children from both the control and intervention groups achieved remarkably
higher mean scores in the numeracy boost. Their performance was optimum in this
area of assessment. The study recommends that digital learning can be
scaled up and learners observed for a longer period of time with rigorous
methodology applied to allow plausible results that can be attributed to the
interventions.