Remotely assessing foundational skills of 5–14-year-old children: A six-country psychometric evaluation of the remote assessment of learning (ReAL)

Approximately 250 million children worldwide are out of school. There is growing consensus for investing in feasible, contextually appropriate, psychometrically tested, remote tools to support quality education in low-resource contexts, including low- and middle-income countries and crisis-affected contexts. Save the Children developed the Remote Assessment of Learning (ReAL) to assess 5-14-year-old children's foundational learning. Children (N = 4,840) were sampled from Cambodia, Mozambique, Niger, the occupied Palestinian territories, the Philippines, and Sudan, with an approximately equal proportion of male and female children within each country. The study assessed inter-rater reliability, factor structure, item slope and difficulty, criterion validity, and test-retest reliability. Results show moderate evidence that ReAL is valid and reliable for literacy and numeracy; evidence for social-emotional skills is weaker. This is the first cross-country evaluation of a remote assessment of learning.