The Sustainable Development Goals and the Education 2030 Declaration have placed equity at the center of the international development agenda for education. After over a decade of being limited to gender disaggregation, the community is coming to the realization that many other dimensions of equity are continuously unmeasured and consequently, gaps and disparities are under-reported. Substantial progress is being made with the leadership of the GEM Report, the Global Partnership for Education, and UNESCO Institute for Statistics. However, concerted efforts across all actors in the education and development space are necessary to make equity-oriented data production and equity-based analysis of education program impact and learning outcomes part and parcel of everyday work. Reaching equity in education by 2030 will not be possible unless each organization working in this space produces and analyses data through an equity lens. The Education Equity Research Initiative (www.educationequity2030.org) is a collaborative effort launched in 2016 that aims to foster and advance the generation of data and evidence on equity in education, through the use of common frameworks and measurement tools. This symposium addresses the following two questions posed within this sub-theme:
- What are the main barriers to equitable teaching and learning and how can they be overcome?
- What are the most effective ways of providing more equitable teaching and learning and what can we learn from those that have not worked?
The symposium is formed around a common analytical framework developed by the Equity Initiative for analysis of learning outcomes data, with a differentiated look at program impact. Using a common sequence of analytical steps, all contributors to this panel apply an equity lens to their own programmatic data. The common sequence is as follows:
- Understanding the shape and nature of the distribution, identifying struggling students and the equity dimensions present (gender, poverty, language or ethnicity, disability, displacement);
- Building the profile of lowest performing students by equity dimensions;
- Understanding within-school and across-school disparities in performance;
- Examining program inputs across equity dimensions, and trajectories over time;
- Finally, examining impact heterogeneity: does the program have an equity-building effect?
Each contribution to this symposium illuminates one element of the analysis, from an understanding of the equity dimensions of the target population of a given program, to identifying the predictors of low performance, to examining within- and across- school variability in learning outcomes, to disaggregating impact analysis by equity categories. Thus, a common thread addressing the sub-theme questions goes through all presentations.
Paper 1: Equity Implications from Impact Evaluations: A Structured Approach (FHI 360). This presentation, first in this symposium, offers the methodological framework of the Structured Questions, and examines a simulated dataset to demonstrate the proposed structured approach to impact evaluations and highlight variability of group and school learning outcomes.
Paper 2: Every child: Can we use data to target reading interventions more effectively? (Save the Children). This presentation explores between- and within-school variation of achievement and its meaning for program targeting. To better understand the nature of starting inequities at the school level, this contribution examines impact for schools identified as having higher proportions of lower-performing students, and discusses the implications of this analysis for program implementation.
Paper 3: A Focus on Equity to Inform Internal Evaluations (RTI International). The analysis identifies equity dimensions relevant to the program- and country-contexts and augments the structured approach to include a longitudinal aspect to the analysis, examining growth trajectories as a way of tracing equity effects.
Paper 4: Equity in Non-Cognitive Outcomes (IRC). This presentation applies the structured sequence to an analysis of non-cognitive outcomes, using data from a battery of socio-emotional learning assessments.
