Educators and policymakers want to strengthen teacher preparation in order to improve student learning, but evidence is lacking about what makes training most effective, especially in early childhood education. Researchers evaluated a pre-service mentoring and training program for student teachers of kindergarten in Ghana’s Western region.
Preliminary Key Findings
» The training program significantly improved student teachers’ implementation of the curriculum and knowledge of early childhood education and development.
» The program’s impacts on teachers’ professional well-being were mixed: FTTT teachers had higher levels of motivation and feelings of personal accomplishment, but lower levels of job satisfaction when placed as full-time teachers.
» One year after being placed as full-time teachers, these improvements had not translated into improved child learning or development outcomes.
» An additional four-day head teacher sensitization training did not have any impacts on teaching quality or child outcomes.
“Partnership Schools” are free, public schools managed by private operators. After one year, public schools managed by private operators raised student learning by 60 percent compared to standard public schools. But costs were high, performance varied across operators, and contracts authorized the largest operator to push excess pupils and under-performing teachers into other government schools. Read the full paper here.
Improving learning among low-achieving students is a challenge in education. We present results from the first randomized experiment of an inquiry-based remedial science education program for low-performing elementary students in a developing-country setting. Third-grade students in 48 low-income public elementary schools in Metropolitan Lima who score at the bottom half of their school distribution in a science test taken at the beginning of the school year are randomly assigned to receive up to 16 remedial science tutoring sessions of 90 minutes each. Control group compliance with assignment is close to perfect. Treatment group compliance is 40 percent, equivalent to 4.5 tutoring sessions, or a 4 percent increase in total science instruction time. Despite the low treatment intensity, students assigned to the remedial sessions score 0.12 standard deviations higher on a science endline test, with all gains concentrated among boys. We find no evidence of remedial education producing within-student spillovers to other subject areas (math or reading) or spillovers on other students in the classroom. We conclude that low-intensity remedial education can have an effect on science learning among low-achieving students
IPA Zambia is pleased to share its second quarter bulletin of 2017. This bulletin features updates on our research projects on improving public services by improving staff allocation; trust, spontaneous clusters, and the growth of urban small- and medium-sized enterprises; and interpersonal communication to encourage use of the Maximum Diva Woman's Condom. This bulletin also highlights IPA Zambia's presentation of preliminary results from the Girls Negotiation study in early May.
In lower- and middle-income countries, including Ghana, students in rural areas dramatically underperform their urban peers. Rural schools struggle to attract and retain professionally trained teachers (GES 2012; World Bank 2012). We explore one potential solution to the problem of teacher recruitment: distance instruction. Through a cluster randomized controlled trial, we estimate the impact of a program that broadcasts live instruction via satellite to rural primary school students. The program equipped classrooms in 70 randomly selected Ghanaian schools with the technology required to connect to a studio in Accra. An additional 77 schools served as the control. Instructors in Accra provided math and English lessons to classrooms in the treatment group. The model is interactive, and students in satellite classes could communicate in real time with their remote teachers. We estimate significant gains (p<.05) in rural students’ numeracy and foundational literacy skills. We find no impact on attendance and classroom time-on-task (as measured through unannounced classroom observations), suggesting that these gains may result from improved instructional quality rather than from increased instruction time.
In Liberia, we have continued our global tradition of rigorous, applicable research by building foundational research capacity and conducting evaluations in areas of pressing national concern. Examples of our work described in this brief offer promising insights into everyday issues that affect the lives of the Liberian poor.
In Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali, we have continued our global tradition of rigorous, applicable research by building foundational research capacity and conducting evaluations in areas of pressing national concern. Examples of our work below offer promising insights into everyday issues that affect the lives of the Francophone West African poor.
IPA Zambia is pleased to share its first quarter bulletin of 2017. This bulletin highlights our research projects on the impact of teaching girls negotiation skills and the challenges of water provision, including policy dissemination events co-hosted with the International Growth Centre on results from these two studies. This bulletin also features our project on maternal mortality risk and the gender gap in desired fertility.
In 2008, 682 secondary school scholarships were awarded by lottery among 2,064 Ghanaian students (aged 17 on average) who were admitted to a specific school and track but could not immediately enroll, in most cases due to lack of funds. We use follow-up data collected until 2016 to document downstream impacts by age 25. For the whole sample, scholarship winners were 26 percentage points (55%) more likely to complete secondary school, obtained 1.26 more years of secondary education, scored an average of 0.15 standard deviations greater on a reading and math test, and adopted more preventative health behavior. Women who received a scholarship had 0.217 fewer children by age 25. Scholarship winners were also 3 percentage points (30%) more likely to have ever enrolled in tertiary education. Despite the fact that they were 2.5 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school at the time of the last survey, they were 5.5 percentage points (10%) more likely to have positive earnings and had significantly higher (hyperbolic sine) earnings. For students admitted to vocational tracks (comprising 60% of the sample) scholarships did not increase tertiary education, which simplifies the interpretation of labor market outcomes. In this subsample, scholarships increased the likelihood of earning money by 8.8 percentage points (16%) and increased total earnings by 19%. The estimated financial rate of return to education in this subsample is 13%. For students admitted to academic majors, scholarships increased the chance of having enrolled in tertiary education by 5.3 percentage points on a base of 11 percent. This effect is driven overwhelmingly by women, who nearly double their rate of tertiary enrollment and fully catch up with men. We cannot reject the hypothesis that among those admitted to academic tracks, scholarships did not affect average labor market participation and earnings by age 25, but since more scholarship winners than non-winners were still in school as of 2016, it is too early to definitively assess labor market impacts in this population.
A clustered randomized trial in Bangladesh examines alternative strategies to reduce child marriage and teenage childbearing and increase girls’ education. Communities were randomized into three treatment and one control group in a 2:1:1:2 ratio. From 2008, girls in treatment communities received either i) a six-month empowerment program, ii) a financial incentive to delay marriage, or iii) empowerment plus incentive. Data from 19,060 girls 4.5 years after program completion show that girls eligible for the incentive for at least two years were 22% (-9.9ppts, p<0.01) less likely to be married under 18, 14% (-5.2ppts, p<0.01) less likely to have given birth under 20, and 21% (5.6ppts, p<0.05) more likely to be in school at age 22. Unlike other incentive programs that are conditional on girls staying in school, an incentive conditional on marriage alone has the potential to benefit out-of-school girls. We find insignificantly different effects for girls in and out of school at baseline. The empowerment program did not decrease child marriage or teenage childbearing. However, girls eligible for the empowerment program were 12% (3.1ppts, p<0.05) more likely to be in-school and had completed 2.9 months (0.24 years, p<0.10) of additional schooling.
Objectives. To evaluate whether text-messaging programs can improve reproductive health among adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries.
Methods. We conducted a cluster–randomized controlled trial among 756 female students aged 14 to 24 years in Accra, Ghana, in 2014. We randomized 38 schools to unidirectional intervention (n = 12), interactive intervention (n = 12), and control (n = 14). The unidirectional intervention sent participants text messages with reproductive health information. The interactive intervention engaged adolescents in text-messaging reproductive health quizzes. The primary study outcome was reproductive health knowledge at 3 and 15 months. Additional outcomes included self-reported pregnancy and sexual behavior. Analysis was by intent-to-treat.
Results. From baseline to 3 months, the unidirectional intervention increased knowledge by 11 percentage points (95% confidence interval [CI] = 7, 15) and the interactive intervention by 24 percentage points (95% CI = 19, 28), from a control baseline of 26%. Although we found no changes in reproductive health outcomes overall, both unidirectional (odds ratio [OR] = 0.14; 95% CI = 0.03, 0.71) and interactive interventions (OR = 0.15; 95% CI = 0.03, 0.86) lowered odds of self-reported pregnancy for sexually active participants.
IPA Zambia is pleased to share with you its final bulletin of the year: "2016 in Review." This bulletin highlights ten of IPA Zambia's research projects, including updates from projects included in the previous bulletin as well as new contributions. We hope you enjoy this look at the high-quality evidence we've generated this past year, and we look forward to continuing this work with you in the year ahead.
We evaluated a program to improve literacy instruction on the Kenyan coast using training workshops, semiscripted lesson plans, and weekly text-message support for teachers to understand its impact on students’ literacy outcomes and on the classroom practices leading to those outcomes. The evaluation ran from the beginning of Grade 1 to the end of Grade 2 in 51 government primary schools chosen at random, with 50 schools acting as controls. The intervention had an impact on classroom practices with effect sizes from 0.57 to 1.15. There was more instruction with written text and more focus on letters and sounds. There was a positive impact on three of four primary measures of children’s literacy after two years, with effect sizes up to 0.64, and school dropout reduced from 5.3% to 2.1%. This approach to literacy instruction is sustainable, and affordable and a similar approach has subsequently been adopted nationally in Kenya.