Authors: Elizabeth Hassan, Wim Groot, Louis Volante
Affiliated organization: Elsevier, International Journal of Educational Research Open
Type of publication: Review.
Date of publication: 2022.
Introduction
Well established is the role of education in improving livelihoods, facilitating intergenerational social mobility, and fostering economic growth. Similarly, contemporary literature has advanced that education would consolidate the ability to acquire new knowledge and technology, which are needed in the transition to knowledge economy.
Despite the investments made under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and now Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the World Development Report (WDR) noted the crisis of poor learning outcomes, with many countries “failing to deliver learning to all.” The United Nations reported that about 617 million youth worldwide lack basic mathematics and literacy skills. It is worth noting that this statistic includes children enrolled in schools, and is therefore an indicator of a significant learning crisis.
In the context of educational interventions and learning outcomes, systematic reviews conducted in the past decade have covered important issues, including: rural electrification of schools, such as the effect of lack of electricity on achievement ; supply-side and demand-side factors in school attendance and learning ; school and teacher characteristics that have strong, positive impacts on learning and student time spent in school ; policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries ; and, most recently, educational interventions with an impact on student learning in Sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, why certain interventions seem to be more effective than others.
Results
Supply-side interventions
Supply-side interventions typically focus on the education system and learning providers. Specifically, they cover funding provided to improve the physical condition of schools (e.g., building renovations, laboratory facilities or furniture, electrification, etc.) or to provide infrastructure, such as new schools and Information and Communication Technologies facilities.
Supply-side interventions also target aspects of education that affect the quality of the teaching provided or of the learning attained and include items as hiring qualified teachers; teacher training; providing teaching materials and aids such as computers, boards, flipcharts, and textbooks; and offering teacher incentive programs, including awards and bonuses, etc.
Infrastructure
Infrastructural interventions include areas such as electrification, construction, or renovation of school buildings (classrooms, offices, laboratories, etc.) and provision of related facilities and equipment, including furniture. In general, the included reviews found a positive correlation between electrification and improved learning outcomes. Infrastructure such as roofs and walls also maintained a positive outcome. Hence, the authors concluded that having a fully functioning school with functional buildings, desks, tables, and chairs and complemented with a school library appear conducive to student learning.
Teachers and teaching methods
Overall, the findings suggested that investments in teachers and teaching methods have a positive impact on learning outcomes. In Kenya, the hiring of additional teachers led to improved test scores for students assigned to those teachers. In terms of teaching methods, it has been observed that language of instruction apparently had an effect on student learning and that instruction in local language improved comprehension and performance.
Teaching and learning aids
Interventions involving pedagogical materials (e.g., textbooks, workbooks, and exercise books) and infrastructure were associated primarily with positive effects on student learning in the form of increased test scores.
School management
It was found that community-based management of schools through information on school performance or direct monitoring of teacher performance improved test scores in Kenya and Madagascar. In Kenya, a study emphasized that reducing class size without implementing any other reform led to lower teacher effort and had no discernible improvement in student achievement, whereas combining reduced class sizes with one or more initiatives designed to improve instruction and change children’s daily experiences in school resulted in improved student achievement.
Financial incentives
In contrast to cash transfers, performance-based incentives were found to generally have a positive impact on student performance. It was found that merit-based scholarships increased learning, and reported that five out of six studies on scholarships showed a significantly positive relationship. In Kenya, merit-based scholarships were also found to improve the performance of female students, as well as exhibiting a spillover effect among male students.
Conclusions
Evidence from the reviews suggests that interventions covering infrastructure, teachers and teaching aids, and student performance-based incentives are generally successful due to the following factors: they directly influence a student’s daily experience in school; and they are less susceptible to capture by exogenous factors.
Interventions such as cash transfers, ICT, and teaching and learning aids were observed to have mixed, unclear, and sometimes less effective results due to the following factors: they are more susceptible to exogenous factors or dependencies that affect their efficacy (i.e Cash transfers are susceptible to resource substitution, and ICT are dependent on other inputs such as access to electricity and to the relevant knowledge); they tend to be more dependent on contextual, individual, or school characteristics; and the breadth of research on such interventions has been insufficient.