A critical missing element: critical thinking at Rwanda's public universities and the implications for higher education reform

In the years since the genocide, the Government of Rwanda has contributed significant financial resources to the re-establishment and development of its public higher education sector. This investment has largely been justified in terms of the contribution of university graduates to the country’s vision of becoming a service-based knowledge economy, capable of reducing its reliance on foreign aid and technical assistance. Implicit in this vision for the future is an assumption that a university education will help students to improve in their ability to think critically about problems and to use evidence when making decisions.\ud \ud This study empirically investigated this assumption by administering a version of the Collegiate Learning Assessment – a performance-task-based test of critical thinking, adapted for use in Rwanda – to a random sample of 220 students enrolled at three of Rwanda’s most prestigious public institutions. Assessment results were supplemented with in-depth case studies at two of the institutions involved in the study. Results of the study suggest that Rwandan students are not significantly improving in their critical thinking ability during their time at university. Critical thinking ability in Rwanda seems to be largely influenced by the academic experiences provided within university Faculties, as the use of innovative classroom practices appears to have a positive impact on the cultivation of critical thinking skills. However, results indicate that such practices cannot be assumed, as faculty motivation and understanding of pedagogical innovations can significantly affect their effective implementation.\ud \ud The international community has largely focused its higher education reform efforts on improvements in institutional efficiency, but the results of this study indicate that student learning outcomes cannot be ignored. Without similar support for initiatives that seek to improve pedagogy, regional revitalisation efforts are unlikely to have a substantial effect on development objectives

Reforming Higher Education Teaching Practices in Africa

Critical thinking – the process of questioning and learning with an open mind – is considered one of the most important outcomes of a contemporary university education, a crucial skill for graduate participation in the global ‘knowledge economy’. Thanks to innovative research from University College London, UK together with researchers from the University of Botswana, the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, and Strathmore University in Kenya, universities across sub-Saharan Africa are now making changes to their teaching practices to support the development of their students’ critical thinking skills.ESRC-DFI

The effectiveness of school-based decision making in improving educational outcomes: a systematic review

The rhetoric around decentralisation suggests school-based management improves education outcomes. Existing reviews on school-based decision-making have tended to focus on proximal outcomes and offer very little information about why school-based decision-making has positive or negative effects in different circumstances. The authors systematically searched for and synthesised evidence from 35 quantitative and qualitative studies evaluating 17 individual interventions on the effectiveness of school-based decision-making on educational outcomes. Devolving decision-making to the level of the school appears to have a somewhat beneficial effect on dropout, repetition and teacher attendance. Effects on test-scores are more robust, being positive in aggregate and for middle-income countries specifically. On the other hand, school-based decision-making reforms appear to be less effective in communities with generally low levels of education, where parents have low status relative to school personnel. The authors conclude that school-based decision-making reforms are less likely to be successful in highly disadvantaged communities

DataSHIELD – new directions and dimensions

In disciplines such as biomedicine and social sciences, sharing and combining sensitive individual-level data is often prohibited by ethical-legal or governance constraints and other barriers such as the control of intellectual property or the huge sample sizes. DataSHIELD (Data Aggregation Through Anonymous Summary-statistics from Harmonised Individual-levEL Databases) is a distributed approach that allows the analysis of sensitive individual-level data from one study, and the co-analysis of such data from several studies simultaneously without physically pooling them or disclosing any data. Following initial proof of principle, a stable DataSHIELD platform has now been implemented in a number of epidemiological consortia. This paper reports three new applications of DataSHIELD including application to post-publication sensitive data analysis, text data analysis and privacy protected data visualisation. Expansion of DataSHIELD analytic functionality and application to additional data types demonstrate the broad applications of the software beyond biomedical sciences

The Study to Explore Early Development (SEED): A Multisite Epidemiologic Study of Autism by the Centers for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research and Epidemiology (CADDRE) Network

The Study to Explore Early Development (SEED), a multisite investigation addressing knowledge gaps in autism phenotype and etiology, aims to: (1) characterize the autism behavioral phenotype and associated developmental, medical, and behavioral conditions and (2) investigate genetic and environmental risks with emphasis on immunologic, hormonal, gastrointestinal, and sociodemographic characteristics. SEED uses a case–control design with population-based ascertainment of children aged 2–5 years with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children in two control groups—one from the general population and one with non-ASD developmental problems. Data from parent-completed questionnaires, interviews, clinical evaluations, biospecimen sampling, and medical record abstraction focus on the prenatal and early postnatal periods. SEED is a valuable resource for testing hypotheses regarding ASD characteristics and causes

Student Pathways in South Africa

The recent student protests in South Africa highlight a disconnect between academic research on higher education and institutional policy and practice. One reason for this impasse may be the “siloing” of research focused on different “moments” along a student’s pathway through higher education; another is the relative lack of research focused on less-resourced institutions. Addressing these challenges is a priority, not only in South Africa but also around the world