A cover page for 'Youth Volunteers Can Contribute to Significant Reading Gains: Evidence from the HYVALL project in Senegal'. In the cover page, on the left are two young boys learning together and in another picture a youth volunteer is teaching a young girl. The Harnessing Youth Volunteers as Literacy Leaders (HYVALL) project in Senegal was a two-year education program financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the All Children Reading Grand Challenge and implemented by YMCA Senegal with technical assistance from Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC). The program was designed to assess the impact of continuous tutoring in literacy by community youth volunteers, for students considered to be at risk for poor literacy development. 395 local volunteers were trained in the application of literacy activities and 6,260 students participated in project activities. Overall, students who participated in the HYVALL intervention exhibited dramatically larger gains in their fluency and reading comprehension from baseline to endline than their comparison group counterparts. These results suggest that an intervention like HYVALL, which gives students opportunities for reading instruction outside the school setting (increasing time on task), provides regular one-on one tutoring and mentoring, and encourages parents’ involvement in the reading development of their children, can lead to significant student improvement in reading.

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