A Systems Approach to Improving Foundational Reading Skills at a Preschool in India

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a helpful and clear paper, which deserves to be published. It details the introduction of learning, teaching and monitoring approaches that the authors consider to improve their teaching, and delivering these. The methodology is well justified as a case study (action research?) and the paper is easy to follow. 

I have some suggestions to make about the order in which the information is given, which might help the reader. 

1. The Context

The fact that the pupils were being taught in the medium of English, which was not their home language, should be mentioned earlier in the paper. 3 to 5 year old children are considered. The information about non-home language instruction should be given earlier in the paper, with other setting factors. The definition of 'mid-tier' fees might be better within the text than in a footnote.

Each child was assessed once by a Curriculum Based Measure (CBM) at the end of three years of schooling (p.4), but this data is not much explained in the paper - were any other summative measured used? 

2. Child Progress

The children were aged 3 - 4 years during the study. The CBM baseline and Key Developmental Indicators were taken in 2016/7 (with children aged four years?).The abstract gives the statistic that 87% of pupils scored below their anticipated grade level in 2016 but 89% achieved grade level benchmarks by 2021. This coincides with the period during which the curriculum innovations were presented: Jolly Phonics was introduced in 2018/9, when only introductory games would be suitable for three year olds, a library of books was provided, and classrooms re-organised towards child-centred approaches. Increased and specialist staff were also appointed around the same time. The largest increase in students' meeting their expected reading grade level is in 2018/9, with numbers moving upwards but more slowly after that. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) or an equivalent measure) were available, but are not presented here.

Thus, around the time Jolly Phonics was introduced and extra staff employed, more that half of pupils were reading above grade levels. Had this largest increase noted in the study already taken place? The increase continues on a less steep trajectory. Could the authors comment on this?

3. The presentation of information in the Pedagogy sections.

Descriptions of additional improvements in specific areas are given, each followed by references. It might be more helpful to the reader to give these references first, as the theoretical basis for each innovation, then the descriptions of practical applications. I have not checked all of the references: there are 163, and the editor may want to judge whether this number can be allowed? I personally think they are helpful.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear writers your article is extremely interesting. However, you would have to revise its structure according to the current standards for writing articles. The first part of the article is the Ιntroduction, followed by the Literature review. The findings are written in a separate section of the article from the discussion, while in the discussion part all the research questions are answered one by one (For more comments see the attached file). On the other hand, the excerpts of the interviews listed in the article should be numbered and separated with a space before and after the rest of the text. Finally, since you refer to observation in several parts of the article, the observation form should be included in the supplementary material of the article.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx