Academic Success for Roma Children

Academic success for Roma Children is an international project that was implemented simultaneously in six counties: Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia and Moldova.

Donor: Roma Education Fund

Duration: 2005-7 (24 months)

Target groups: teachers and trainers from 6 countries in SEE, Roma primary school children with reading difficulties

The goal of this project was to build on expertise and investments made in previous years of education project implementation, by developing testing and teaching procedures that have a high likelihood of success with Roma children, and that will be relatively easy to disseminate to several other projects across Central Europe who are concerned with the education of Roma children, both within the public education systems and NGOs.
The specific aims of this project were:

• to develop diagnostic instruments, in the languages of the participating countries, that can be used to assess children’s emergent literacy concepts; 

• to develop tutoring procedures, written up in training manuals, that are related to the diagnostic information revealed by the assessments

• to field test the assessments and tutoring strategies with at least twelve students in each participating country;

• to disseminate the findings, including all training materials, to groups concerned with the education of Roma children in each country, including Step by Step, Roma centers  and RWCT programs. 

Types of activities: training, mentoring, tutoring, developing reading assessment instruments, piloting the instruments; production and translation of guidebooks

Deliverables
– 4 workshops for 21 lead educators (a total of 20 days’ training);
– 105 primary school teachers trained to deliver remedial education (assessment and one-to-one tutoring to students aged 6-8);
– a total of 190 students assessed and assisted with remedial education activities;
– reading assessment instruments developed in 5 languages;
– tutoring program and training manuals developed in 5 languages;
– 7 accounts of instruction and reports of results;
– A set of standards and rubrics for appropriate remedial teaching using the assessments and teaching practices.
Professors Charles Temple, PhD., Alan Crawford, PhD, and Codruţa Temple, MA developed the training program, wrote the guidebooks, ran workshops, monitored the impact of the project, and provided on-site consultancy for the local master teachers who have developed reading assessment instruments, and are pilot testing them on children in their school.