<![CDATA[Foundational literacy improvement in remote and resource-limited settings requires school principals who can translate policy into instructional support. However, evidence on leadership capacity-building in Indonesia’s disadvantaged, frontier, and remote regions remains limited. This study evaluated descriptive changes in principals’ instructional leadership competence after a three-day training program in Tambrauw Regency and derived contextual follow-up strategies. A quantitative pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design involved 26 education-unit leaders, comprising 20 primary school principals and 6 early childhood education principals, selected through total sampling. Data were collected using equivalent written pretest and posttest instruments and analyzed using minimum, maximum, mean, standard deviation, score range, percentage change, and coefficient of variation. The mean increased from 12.69 to 13.88 (9.38%), the minimum score rose from 9 to 11, the score range narrowed from 8 to 6, and the coefficient of variation declined from 16.08% to 12.25%. These findings indicate a positive and more evenly distributed improvement in participants’ conceptual understanding. The study contributes a context-sensitive framework combining post-training coaching, principal learning communities, simplified literacy supervision tools, local reading resources, and multilevel evaluation. Because no control group or inferential test was used, the results should be interpreted as preliminary evidence rather than definitive causal effectiveness.]]>
