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Reading instruction for young Arabic speakers presents challenges for textbook publishers and teachers. In the present study, the authors conduct an analysis at the word level of four multidisciplinary textbooks for reading instruction in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer the following questions: What are the most common words in standard Arabic? How many of the most common words in standard Arabic are used in the textbooks? How dense is the use of common words? How many rare words are used in the textbooks studied? A word frequency analysis from existing corpora were used to create a most common word list. From that list, the researchers were able to determine frequency and dispersion of the most common words in Arabic that were also used in the textbooks. Frequency and dispersion were calculated by octile, as well. Analysis found that the texts did not make use of any of the rare words found in the corpus, but many words in the texts did not appear in either the reference corpus inclusive of the common words list. Recommendations for policymakers and textbook publishers follow discussion of results.

Dowd and Bartlett (2019) tested the reading competencies of second graders attending Save the Children programs in 11 countries. They used sixty-word passages and comprehension questions without time limits and analyzed data of students reading more than 10 words per minute. They found wide disparities in speed among those who showed high comprehension rates between-countries and within-country. They interpreted the findings as diminishing the role of speed in early-grade assessment and instruction. However, the study has major issues on three fronts: (a) use of English-language studies for transparent orthographies, (b) disregard of current neurocognitive research on memory functions, and (c) sample selectivity. These raise grave concerns regarding the internal and external validity of the conclusions. The authors' dedication is admirable, but their findings do not justify any policy recommendations. To the contrary, given the importance of speed for comprehension, their recommendations may have the perverse effect of disadvantaging the very students that Save the Children is supporting. Researchers and journals have the ethical obligation to publish studies that reflect contemporary reading research.

Despite significant investments, lower-income countries face a learning crisis. A clamor has thus arisen worldwide for greater accountability of those involved in service delivery. To obtain new insights, the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report was dedicated to accountability in 2017, and the research on this topic was reviewed. A summary is published herein. Accountability seems strongest in explicit hierarchies with direct principal-agent relations, as in an army, and when individual contributions are identified. It is enhanced when tasks are clearly defined, information is sufficient, and sanctions for violators are significant and credible. People may demonstrate better judgment if they are accountable for procedures, such as teachers using class time efficiently. By contrast, accountability for difficult outcomes, such as students' actual memory consolidation, results in avoidance and efforts to limit one's role. Conditions inherent in the education sector may compromise accountability. Government officials, who frequently change, are accountable to groups, whose staff and consultants also change. At the school level, parents rarely have principal-agent relations with staff, so the latter may feel little obligation to teach. In complex organizational settings, accountability could be enhanced by identifying individual contributions to a task, providing comparison standards, imposing significant and enforceable sanctions, and focusing on processes and decisions rather than strictly on outcomes. The Sustainable Development Goals will be more easily fulfilled if governments and donors can mitigate the effects of this little-understood phenomenon.

Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be partly due to a neglect of practice in decoding letters. Visual stimuli are best learned symbol by symbol, with pattern analogies and much practice to unite smaller components and speed up identification. The prerequisite for comprehending volumes of text is parallel-processing of letters. This happens when the letter-by-letter decoding function moves to the visual word form area of the brain, which recognizes words as if they were faces. Strangely, people may become fluent readers in transparent orthographies without knowing the relevant language. To teach the poor, governments and donors should promote instruction of individual letters and independent student practice with teacher feedback; then, students may achieve parallel processing. Teachers would emphasize comprehension and writing after the attainment of fluency. This methodology requires a rather lengthy textbook for every student, but it simplifies classroom activities and teacher training. To attain the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030, teachers must base instruction on specific scientific studies rather than "best practices".

Technological achievements require complex skills for the workplace, along with creativity, communication, and critical thinking. To compete effectively in the global economy, governments must provide their citizens with relevant education and training. To help close the skills gap, international agencies often advise governments of developing countries to de-emphasise basic knowledge and focus instead on complex cognition and systemic improvements. However, the donors' advice may be due to memory biases of highly educated people. Such training strategies would fail most students, because complex skills are built by combining and automatising shorter chains of thoughts or behaviours. An effective training process requires much practice, feedback and rearrangement of subcomponents over time. Execution of various tasks must become automatic and effortless to avoid using up too much of the very limited capacity of what is termed the "working memory." Marketable skills are those skills which are fluently performed without excessive cognitive load. To provide complex skills for all, including non-cognitive skills, curricula should therefore first ensure detailed instruction and practice of basic components which can then be strung together and applied to new tasks. Policy advisers seem unaware of these scientific insights, so they are not taken into account. The article reviews the essential neurocognitive functions involved in the acquisition and execution of skills chains. The author concludes that to improve the skills of economically disadvantaged populations, donors and governments must acquire expertise and offer advice on the basis of cognitive science.

The international Education for All initiative to bring about universal primary education has resulted in large enrollment increases in lower income countries but with limited outcomes. Due to scarcity in material and human resources, all but the better off often fail to learn basic skills. To improve performance within the very limited capacities of low-income educational systems, instructional interventions ought to be designed according to the ways people retain and recall information most efficiently. Without this research-based line of reasoning, donor and government staff may overestimate students' ability to learn from complex methods and scant practice. Applicable concepts include perceptual learning for scripts, automaticity for basic skills, the limitations of working memory, and formation of cognitive networks in long-term memory. However, education faculties rarely teach these topics. A systematic effort is necessary to popularize cognitive science concepts pertinent to basic skills for staff working in the education sector of lower income countries. Therefore, better understanding and application of learning research is urgently needed if universal primary education is to succeed.

With the advent of school-based management, citizen committees in low-income countries or areas are often expected to oversee the functioning of schools, health centres, and other community resources. However, studies of their effectiveness show mixed results. Though members of such committees may be able to repair buildings, they often cannot monitor the quality of instruction or of medical services. This article draws on psychological research to predict the performance of such committees, given their levels of education, group dynamics, and complexity of decisions. The research suggests that committees of the very poor may lack the time and resources to make good decisions; they also lack the experience with quality schools to accurately evaluate service delivery. Thus, donors and governments must understand better the decision-making dilemmas of people with limited literacy. Targeted research may clarify the chains of causality leading from management committee decisions to service delivery and may help improve services to the poor.

In lower-income countries students face an important challenge that has not been well documented: selective teacher attention. In classes with many low-income students, teachers may concentrate on those few who can perform and neglect those who require more help. The latter may fail to learn, attend school less often, and eventually drop out. However, social promotion policies may keep them enrolled during periods of sporadic attendance. This phenomenon has been observed informally in various countries, but only one study, conducted in Albania, has reported actual data. It found that many teachers overestimated the number of students who could follow the topics presented; they did predict that one third would be unable to answer questions but made no efforts to remedy knowledge gaps. Teachers of upper primary classes tended to give little guidance or attention to failing students but gave them passing grades until they dropped out. The article reveals the urgent need to study in detail how this phenomenon arises and to develop strategies to reduce it in the countries or areas where it is prevalent.

Reading depends on the speed of visual recognition and capacity of short-term memory. To understand a sentence, the mind must read it fast enough to capture it within the limits of the short-term memory. This means that children must attain a minimum speed of fairly accurate reading to understand a passage. Learning to read involves "tricking" the brain into perceiving groups of letters as coherent words. This is achieved most efficiently by pairing small units consistently with sounds rather than learning entire words. To link the letters with sounds, explicit and extensive practice is needed; the more complex the spelling of a language, the more practice is necessary. However, schools of low-income students often waste instructional time and lack reading resources, so students cannot get sufficient practice to automatize reading and may remain illiterate for years. Lack of reading fluency in the early grades "creates inefficiencies that affect the entire educational system". Neurocognitive research on reading points to benchmarks and monitoring indicators. All students should attain reading speeds of 45-60 words per minute by the end of grade 2 and 120-150 words per minute for grades 6-8.

Studies have shown that the amount of time students spend engaged in learning tasks is related to learning outcomes. However, schools often offer to the students only a fraction of the time that governments pay for, and schools in lower-income areas often offer less time than governments plan for students. Instructional time ought to be an important accountability tool for those who finance education. Government revenues and private investments pay for teachers' salaries, buildings, teacher training and textbooks, and it is expected that 100% of this investment be used for student learning. In fact, an hour of class in a particular school corresponds to a fraction of the amount of time schools officially operate (about 200 days, 4-5 hours per day at the primary level). Governments' intentions to provide a certain number of instructional hours are defeated at the local level. However, data have rarely been collected to demonstrate the links between instructional time loss, local-level governance, and potentially effective remedies. In this article, the author talks about instructional time, means to assess it, and the implications for improvement through better governance. (Contains 4 figures and 1 note.)

This article presents a reading assessment pilot test that took place in the context of a process of analysis and dialogue aimed at contributing to the analysis of school quality in Peru, as part of a World Bank sector assessment. Peruvian first and second graders at the bottom half of the income distribution were asked to read a brief passage aloud and to answer simple comprehension questions. Only 25% of the first graders and 41% of the second graders were able to read one or more words in the text at the end of the school year; 75% of the first graders could not read at all. Children who could answer all three comprehension questions correctly read at 77 words per minute on average, whereas children who could answer only one or two questions read much more slowly, at 15 and 41 words per minute respectively. The relationship between reading speed and comprehension is consistent with memory research on reading automaticity. The results are also consistent with other observational studies that suggest widespread illiteracy among poorer students in various countries. A rapid reading test, administered quickly and inexpensively, produced comprehensible and actionable information on student performance. If sampling and instrumentation were refined, the methodology could produce baseline and monitoring data that are locally sustainable and internationally comparable. (Contains 5 tables and 9 notes.)

The world has made great strides in providing primary education to the poor, and the donor community has financed much of the effort. However, the standardized achievement tests developed in many countries show unbelievably low outcomes. One of the reasons why such is happening to many countries is that their schools' have lower time on task. While time is not the only variable significantly related to student achievement, the amount of time students have available to process information emerges as a central concept in the acquisition of basic skills. The limited and inefficiently used time in the schools of the poor is the hallmark of the "pedagogy of poverty." In this article, the author examines the causes of wastage of instructional time and inefficient teaching methods. The author also suggests several strategies for increasing instructional time. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures and 13 notes.)

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International student admissions in universities can be facilitated by multivariate statistical procedures. On the basis of existing data on student characteristics, predictions can be made regarding performance of applicants. These predictions consider personal variables, knowledge of English, and various indicators of academic performance. (Author)