COLLEGE PARK, MD—9/9/13 — The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) held its bi-annual Education Summit from August 6 - 8 in Washington, DC. The summit was designed to further advance strategic partnerships for education, invest in transformative innovations and promote a greater focus on results. Optimal Solutions Group, LLC (Optimal) presented as implementer of the USAID-funded Secondary Analysis for Results Tracking (SART) project. The title of their presentation was “The Use of Data Collection and Analysis to Track Improvements in Reading.”

As the global community recognizes the need to develop and build systems to monitor progress in student learning, USAID’s Education Strategy sets the aspiration to quantitatively measure impact at the level of students’ reading skills. Within a wide diversity of countries and contexts, USAID Missions are developing and implementing plans for data collection, including baseline and endline datasets, to illustrate how early grade reading data can be used to measure impact. The discussion considered the complexities of collecting and using education data for policy dialogue, program design and implementation, and how experiences to date can inform global conversations about student learning.

For more information please visit: http://www.usaided2013.net/summit-agenda/

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Optimal Solutions Group, LLC

Founded in 2000, Optimal Solutions Group, LLC is a nonpartisan public policy research and technical assistance firm that stands out for its quantitative expertise and innovative approaches to provide rigorous, data-driven research and technical assistance to government agencies, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations. Located at the University of Maryland’s M Square Research Park in College Park, Optimal is a leader in driving real-time public policy research. Optimal has 60+ employees, including multidisciplinary researchers with backgrounds in business, communication, economics, education, health policy, psychology, public policy, sociology, statistics, and urban planning. Optimal has four research centers: Health, Education, Housing, and Workforce Development and Social Policy.