Assessment to action: New thinking from India

In countries such as India, impressive progress has been made in schooling. More than 95 per cent of children are now enrolled in school. But when we look at children’s learning, the situation is far from satisfactory. Available evidence suggests that in Grade 5, only about half of all enrolled children can read or do arithmetic expected at Grade 2 level. Faced with this crisis, how can assessment lead to effective instruction? ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) uses simple tools to assess the current level of children’s ability to read and to do arithmetic. Using this assessment, children are grouped for instruction by level rather than by grade. Appropriate methods and materials are used for each group to help children begin from where they are today and move to where they need to be. The ‘teaching-at-the-right-level’ approach has been found to be effective in many settings in India for building basic skills quickly. This ‘new thinking’ from India can provide large-scale solutions for the learning crisis faced in many parts of the developing world

Addressing school quality: some policy pointers from rural north India

This briefing identifies key issues influencing children's learning outcomes and provides policy pointers for remedial action. The study summarized here was undertaken in two states of north India whose educational challenges are comparable to or worse than those of many African and South Asian countries. Thus the findings potentially have utility not only in India but more widely

The prince in the classroom

It is afternoon in a government primary his stomach out and throws his head back. Then he school in Bakshi ka Talab block not far from walks forward in a leisurely fashion moving his arms Lucknow. The Class 2 classroom is packed very slowly. “Ah ha” says a girl from the back of the with children. In this school, like in many class, “Tahalna” is when you are a fat person walking other schools in the area, the lower grades have many many children. At least half of them look like they are really too young to be in Class 2. We are busy with the language text book. The chapter is long. We start with the first paragraph. Except for one or two children, no one can read even a few lines fluentl

The birth of aser

I remember a hot summer day, almost ten years ago, in a village in Sultanpur district in Uttar Pradesh. We were making a village report card. 2 Before starting work in a village we always did this exercise. Our goal then, as it is even today, was to work with people in the village to ensure that “every child is in school and learning well”. So we would go to every household in the village, and ask every child if he or she went to school. Ten years ago, even in UP, school enrollment levels were high. In some villages, well over 90% of children between the ages of six and fourteen were enrolled in school. But for us, it was important to go beyond schooling and try to get a sense of what a child could do. We used very basic benchmarks for learning - each and every child of elementary school age in the village was asked to read a set of common words and simple paragraphs. In arithmetic, there were numbers to be named and a set of simple arithmetic operations to do

Can information campaigns spark local participation and improve outcomes ? A study of primary education in Uttar Pradesh, India

There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees (VECs), consisting of village government leaders, parents, and teachers. The authors report findings from a survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh, of public schools, households, and VEC members, on the status of education services and the extent of community participation inthe public delivery of education services. They find that parents do not know that a VEC exists, sometimes even when they are supposed to be members of it; VEC members are unaware of even key roles they are empowered to play in education services; and public participation in improving education is negligible, and correspondingly, people's ranking of education on a list of village priorities is low. Large numbers of children in the villages have not acquired basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet parents, teachers, and VEC members seem not to be fully aware of the scale of the problem, and seem not to have given much thought to the role of public agencies in improving outcomes. Learning failures coexist with public apathy to improving it through public action. Can local participation be sparked through grassroots campaigns that inform communities about the VEC and its role in local service delivery? Can such local participation actually affect learning outcomes, and can any impact be sustained? The authors describe information and advocacy campaigns that have been experimentally implemented to address some of the problems with local participation, and future research plans to evaluate their impact.Primary Education,Education For All,Teaching and Learning,Tertiary Education,Access&Equity in Basic Education

Pitfalls of participatory programs : evidence from a randomized evaluation in education in India

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools, into committees and gives these powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey this paper finds that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. The paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries'participation: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. The authors find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.Primary Education,Education For All,Teaching and Learning,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Tertiary Education,Economics of Education

Pitfalls of participatory programs : evidence from a randomized evaluation in education in India

Statement of responsibility on t.p. reads: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Rukmini Benerji [i.e. Banerji], Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster and Stuti KhemaniSeptember 5, 200

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes both locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools into committees and gives these groups powers over resource allocation, and monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey we found that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. This paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation through these committees: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. We find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, we do find that the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had a large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained to teach, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.

Reforms to Increase Teacher Effectiveness in Developing Countries: Systematic Review, September 2016

RLOsRLOsProvides high-quality evidence on reforms/interventions in education systems aimed at improving teacher effectiveness, at scale. This executive summary provides an overview of that key evidence to answer three review questions: RQ1. What is the evidence on the impacts of reforms/interventions of education systems, at scale, to increase teacher effectiveness on: the quality of teaching and on learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries? RQ2. What is the evidence on the relationship between educational reforms/interventions for improving teacher effectiveness, at scale, and the quality of teaching and learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries? RQ3. Where reforms/interventions to education systems to increase teacher effectiveness, at scale, have occurred, what is the evidence on how technical, financial and political barriers have been overcome?ESRC-DFI