Read Philippines or Basa Pilipinas was a four-year early grade reading project that operated from January 2013 to December 2016 and supported the Philippine Department of Education’s national reading program. Basa assisted the implementation of transformative literacy practices in selected divisions of Regions 1 and 7 by providing teacher and student materials, training teachers and school heads, and providing post-training support for Grade 1, 2 and 3 teachers, as well as providing Early Language, Literacy and Numeracy training to kindergarten teachers.

The Basa Pilipinas activity used a quasi-experimental cross-sectional design to evaluate the impact of the treatment in improving reading and comprehension skills. Sampling was conducted at three levels: school, classrooms, and student. The school sample was drawn randomly from the activity’s five provinces. Within each school, one grade 2 classroom was selected randomly for baseline and midline with an additional grade 3 classroom selected during the endline. Within each classroom, students were randomly selected to be administered the assessment. A total of 469 students were sample from 40 schools in two provinces at the baseline (comparison), 1,216 students were sampled from 80 schools in five provinces at the midline (intervention 1), and 1,658 students were sampled from 5 provinces at the endline (intervention 2).

The disparity in the number of provinces sampled is due to the expansion of the intervention from two provinces to five provinces starting at the midline to provide a more complete picture of the Basa outcomes. To enable the computation of estimates of literacy skills among students in all schools affected by the Basa intervention, design weights were applied to the analyses of EGRA data. Design weights were applied to compensate for differences in provincial sampling and to ensure an appropriate representation of learners in all provinces in the sample.