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Description
It is well known that despite great deals of effort made towards social and economic integration of Roma population by local, national and European institutions (e.g. Decade of Roma Inclusion), Roma people still face poverty, segregation and discrimination throughout Europe. The focus of our project is literacy development of Roma children from early school years until the end of middle school. The proposal aims to enhance and improve our understanding of the situation of Roma population by targeting the development of their literacy skills.
The current project proposal (ELIRA 2.0) is a natural continuation of a previous project funded by EEA grants during 2014-2017 (ELIRA). The current project proposal dwells on the research-based evidence collected during the previous project in order to apply the research results by developing a long-term high-intensity educational program aiming to positively impact the literacy skills of Roma children and their non-Roma peers from disadvantaged communities.
The implementation will be conducted with the help of members of a pro-Roma NGO from Romania (OTE). The excellent collaboration of the organisation with Babes-Bolyai University and University of Oslo was already established in ELIRA four years ago when it was contracted by Babes-Bolyai University to assist with the project implementation. This collaboration is also highly relevant given the topic of this call and it is in line with the recommendation that projects that aim to address the topic ”Roma inclusion and empowerment ” should consult with 3 pro-Roma organizations.
Summary of project results
Several reports and studies conducted across Europe indicate that many Roma minority children struggle with lower literacy rates compared with their non-Roma peers. In turn, these limited literacy skills limit the opportunities for Roma minority to have an adequate education, which has negative, long-term impact on their health and employment opportunities. To address this issue, the project ELIRA 2.0 aimed to improve the living conditions of Roma ethnic minority by identifying the extent of which the literacy predictors can contribute to the improvement of literacy development rate among Roma children (and their non-Roma peers from the same communities) as well as to test the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve the literacy skills of Roma children.
The project developed an experimental research study (randomized control trial) to measure the impact of an educational intervention program on the language and literacy development of elementary school students from disadvantaged communities. The focus of the intervention was the development of the oral language skills, and the outcome measures included both language and literacy indicators (measured both by researcher-made and standardized tests). The project included 450 elementary students from 40 communities, who benefited from the intervention delivered by 80 teachers. Their performance was measured by 28 independent assessors before and after the intervention.
The project also continued to follow and measure longitudinally the literacy skills of the students that were originally included in the ELIRA project, which was previously funded by EEA Grants (2014-2017), and that were tested since the beginning of the 1st grade (Fall 2014). Thus, the project gave us the opportunity to follow the same students for 8 years. This was the longest large-scale longitudinal research that focused on the literacy development of Roma children and the longest educational longitudinal research conducted in Romania.
The results of the experimental study indicated positive effects across all literacy indicators. All students participating in the project (from both experimental and control group) made more gains during the project than after. The students from the experimental group made significantly more gains in several areas. Importantly, these effects were generalized to skills tested by standardized tests (e.g., general vocabulary or writing skills, which were not addressed during the project). Some of the results of the longitudinal study helped disentangle the effects of the socioeconomic status, school absenteeism, reading skills and ethnic minority status. They also helped highlight the pathways through which these variables affect the students’ performance to high-stakes exams, which are critical to upward social mobility of disadvantaged groups.
Summary of bilateral results
The project strengthen the bilateral collaboration by helping both Norvegian and Romanian researchers to develop professionally. Thanks to this project and this collaboration, the PI has developed a Laboratory of Advanced Studies in the field of Literacy within Babes-Bolyai University’s STAR Institute. Thanks to this collaboration, the Norwegian researchers are now running an Excellence Center at the university of Oslo – Center of Research on equality in education – which is focused on studying the impact of economic inequality on the academic development of socio-economically disadvantaged children.Thanks to this collaboration, the Norwegian and Romanian researchers have successfully secured another grant and drafter two other grants proposals which will be submitted for funding this year.