Discussant: Nicholas Spaull, University Stellenbosch
The Sustainable Development Goals require better assessment of learning outcomes in ways that are comparable across countries and allow for examination of inequalities. At the same time, policy-makers in many countries lack the information they need to make inclusive education policy, and there is a growing gap between international initiatives and the administrative data that policy-makers often rely on. What can national and international initiatives do to improve the provision of relevant learning data, especially for equity analysis? The three papers in this symposium highlight the possibilities and limitations of current data sources and initiatives. We consider the contribution of large-scale assessments; review current international initiatives on education equity; and describe how a citizen-led assessment programme, LEARNigeria, worked with the national statistics office to improve access to learning data in Nigeria.
1. Patrick Montjourides: The Contribution of Large Scale Assessments to the Monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals
In this paper, we discuss how International and Regional Assessments are being mobilized to respond to the challenge of monitoring the SDG 4 – Education 2030 agenda. We review approaches to using existing datasets (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, SACMEQ, PASEC, ELCE) and, notably, recent work such as attempts to use countries which took part in several assessments as anchoring points. These exercises will gain a lot of attention as they will be used to generate data and indicators on countries’ progress towards SDG 4 targets. The focus has been on using large scale assessments to measure reading and mathematics proficiency, but they can also be used to measure early childhood care and education, equity, skills for sustainable development, and teachers. We highlight potential issues and implications related to the use of these assessments and improvements needed to develop the capacity of the global education community to track progress towards SDG 4 targets.
2. Rachita Daga, Matthew Powell and Stuart Cameron: International initiatives to measure education equity
This paper looks at the current state of the international monitoring architecture for equity in education. We review 22 initiatives that are explicitly or implicitly concerned with monitoring education equity, using the Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) to highlight some of their strengths and shortcomings. These initiatives predominantly use ratios, parity indices, or disaggregated statistics, to show how school attendance, attainment, or learning outcomes vary with gender, wealth, and rural/urban residence. They rely on disaggregation of household survey data, and aspects such as disability and language are often neglected. Quality control for secondary databases varies, with some describing their processes in detail while others say nothing. We argue that greater attempts are needed to process micro data in a more open way, and to link household and school data in order to provide a better picture of (for example) how school and household resources can both feed into educational inequalities. However, a concerted effort is needed to improve the capacity of national administrative systems to support this kind of analysis, in ways that also respond to each government’s own policy debates around educational equity.
3. Mo Adefeso-Olateju: Citizen-led assessments and national statistics: the case of LEARNigeria.
Since 2005, citizen-led assessments have reached over 1 million children in 11 countries, highlighting the power of engaged citizens to generate evidence on learning outcomes, and in many cases to leverage this evidence to initiate effective learning initiatives. This presentation focuses on Nigeria's unique partnership approach to implementing its citizen-led assessment, LEARNigeria. Using empirical data from its two-year pilot, it focuses on how citizens and their governments collaborate to establish assessment priorities, and to design and implement the assessment programme to reach both in-school and out-of-school children.
