How to leverage the time children spend out of school for learning
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- WDR 2018
A recent paper – “Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics” – by Dillon et al., provides answers to both of these, as well as giving new insights into the design of effective early child education.
Good principals can make a big difference
“It is widely believed that a good principal is the key to a successful school.” So say Branch, Hanushek, and Rivkin in their study of school principals on learning productivity. But how do you measure this? Using a database from Texas in the United States, they employ a value-added approach analogous to that used to measure performance among teachers. They control for basic information on student backgrounds (gender, ethnicity, and an indicator of poverty) as well as student test scores from the previous year. Then they ask, What happens to student learning when a school changes principals? They find that increasing principal quality by one standard deviation increases student learning by 0.11 standard deviations. Even after additional adjustments, their most conservative estimates show that “a 1-standard-deviation increase in principal quality translates into roughly 0.05 standard deviations in average student achievement gains, or nearly two months of additional learning.”
Notably, while improving teacher effectiveness affects the average performance of all of the students in his class, improving principal effectiveness affects average performance of the entire school, so the potential gains are high.
Over the last decade, both Kenya and Liberia have sought to scale up successful pilot programs that help children to learn to read. Even as more and more impact evaluations are of programs at scale, pilots still constitute a significant portion of what we test. That’s with good reason: Governments wisely seek to pilot and test programs before expending valuable resources in implementing a program across the country. Last year, I wrote about how the Indian organization Pratham worked with J-PAL to test effective programs to improve reading iteratively, varying different parameters in terms of who was implementing (government teachers versus volunteers) and when (in-school versus during the holidays).
Here is a curated round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries, with a few findings from high-income countries that I found relevant. All are from the last few months, since my last round-up.
If I’m missing recent articles that you’ve found useful, please add them in the comments!