The Liberia Teacher Training Program II (LTTP II) is a partnership between FHI 360 and RTI International to provide support to the central Ministry of Education (MOE). The overarching goal of LTTP II is to enhance pupils' learning in general, and reading proficiency in particular; establish a functional teacher professional development (PD) system; and strengthen the MOE's capacity to manage such a system. The LTTP II was originally designed to work in nine counties: Grand Gedeh, Grand Kru, Lofa, Maryland, Montserrado, Nimba, River Cess, River Gee, and Sinoe. In 2011 and 2012, because of changes in USAID policies, the number of counties was reduced to five (i.e., Bong, Lofa, Margibi, Montserrado, and Nimba), which USAID identifies as a development corridor containing a majority of the Liberian population.

The LTTP II intervention drew on the EGRA Plus model to introduce similarly structured reading and math programs in grades 1, 2, and 3 to approximately 1,020 schools in four counties (i.e., Bong, Lofa, Montserrado, and Nimba) in a phased approach. Cohort 1, the first to receive support, had 792 schools. During the middle of the 2011/2012 school year, the reading program was introduced in all three grades in these schools. During the middle of the 2012/2013 school year, the mathematics program was introduced in all three grades. Cohort 2, consisting of approximately 330 schools, began participating in the program’s reading and mathematics interventions during the 2013/2014 school year and continued during the 2014/2015 school year. Some changes, although not significant, were made to the intervention approach for supporting the Cohort 2 schools.

Schools in the four LTTP II counties were randomly assigned to the Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 groupings. These schools were then grouped in clusters of 12 schools based on geographic proximity, which would allow the program to deliver the interventions more efficiently

Cohort 1: Schools from the four target counties included in Cohort 1 served as the treatment group for the midterm assessment. These schools stopped receiving LTTP II support after the midterm assessment, but they participated in the endline assessment, as a way to determine whether the gains that were achieved during the treatment were sustained.

Cohort 2: Schools included in Cohort 2 in the same four counties began to receive treatment after the midterm assessment, thus, during the final two years of the program. Cohort 2 schools served as a control to which the Cohort 1 results were compared. The performance of Cohort 2 schools were to be compared to that of Cohort 1. The biggest challenge that the program faced regarding the implementation in Cohort 2 schools was the school closings because of the Ebola crisis. Schools were closed between September 2014 and February 2015. Even after the official reopening date, with the gradual actual opening of schools that required LTTP II to wait until schools were safe to open, it took several months to distribute books to schools and to train teachers which in turn severely affected the implementation of the treatment.

External Cohort: A randomly selected sample of schools outside the four target counties served as another comparator, especially after Cohort 2 began receiving treatment alongside Cohort 1.

Except for a small number of schools associated with the RTTIs, schools outside the four target counties did not participate in the program during the lifetime of LTTP II.

This data file contains the 2013 EGRA midline.