Other Education Study

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  • Publication
    Learning Can’t Wait: Lessons for Latin America and the Caribbean from PISA 2022
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-04) Arias Ortiz, Elena; Bos, Maria Soledad; Chen Peraza, Juliana; Giambruno, Cecilia; Levin, Victoria; Oubiña, Victoria; Pineda, Jasmine Anne; Zoido, Pablo
    This report explores the results of the latest round of PISA for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), showcasing the results for the region, the differences within the region and between the region and the rest of the world. For this round of PISA, 14 countries of LAC participated in the assessment, representing the largest number of LAC countries in the assessment since its inception. The report covers three key insights: (1) learning is low and highly unequal in LAC, (2) for most countries trends in learning are not moving in the right direction; and (3) countries in LAC should ensure that all students acquire at least basic proficiency in foundational skills, by addressing disparities and focusing on the effective use of technology.
  • Publication
    Curriculum and Learning: Towards a Competency-based Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Curriculum Reform in Armenia
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-27) World Bank
    Around the world, basic education fails to equip many young people with the essential skills needed for employability in a 21st century job market. Almost half of students in low- and middle-income countries complete their basic education without having developed foundational literacy, numeracy, and socio-emotional skills. Moreover, evolving labor markets demand 21st-century skills like collaboration and critical reasoning, which are not consistently integrated into education systems. To address these issues, it is necessary to ensure that students learn in a meaningful and consistent manner to develop more advanced skills, ultimately enabling them to become more productive citizens who can adapt to the changing nature of work. This report documents the ambitious reimagining of Armenia’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) curriculum in basic education. It describes the main drivers of the reform’s success to date, challenges faced, and rigorous evidence of positive impacts on learning from pilot implementation. With few experiences to draw from, analysis of comprehensive curriculum reforms is relatively rare, limiting the knowledge base for other countries to draw from. This report aims to help fill that gap by: (i) describing the reform process through the lens of the four main elements of effective curriculum reforms described above and (ii) evaluating the reform’s implementation and impacts to date. The report focuses on activities related to STEM subjects that were funded by the EU4Innovation Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Pilot Activities Trust Fund. The government has carried out activities related to non-STEM subjects in parallel.
  • Publication
    Promoting Skills Development for Youth in Zambia: A Review of the Landscape of TEVET and Skills Development
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-14) World Bank
    This report provides an overview of Zambia’s labor market, highlights key potential sectors for future economic development and employment growth, and analyses the challenges faced by the technical education, vocational, and entrepreneurship training (TEVET) system as it seeks to respond to these developments. A key finding of the report is that Zambia’s demographic transition is at a critical juncture, but the country is not reaping the benefits of its potential demographic opportunities due to high levels of youth disengagement and insufficient jobs growth. Youth constitute more than half of the labor force but have low skill levels and are in low-paying jobs. Skills development, and TEVET in particular, is one of the possible policy levers for economic development and is a strategic focus and priority for the government. The skills development ecosystem in Zambia, and in particular the TEVET system, faces capacity constraints regarding the provision of quality and relevant skills for the labor market. The government policy and programmatic environment is highly fragmented, with concerns over the possible duplication of policies and programming, particularly in relation to out-of-school youth, and technical and vocational skills.
  • Publication
    Assessment of Indonesia’s Early Childhood Education and Development Accreditation Process
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-22) World Bank
    Investments in early years of education and childhood development are among the most cost-effective and beneficial a country can make to tackle learning poverty, promote healthy child development, and enhance shared prosperity. Over the past two decades, the Government of Indonesia (GoI) has scaled up its commitment to early childhood education and development (ECED) through various educational reforms, policies, programs, and financial investments. With the expansion of Indonesia’s ECED system, the GoI has committed to improving its quality since the early 2000s. As a key mechanism to raise the quality of ECED services, the GoI actively encourages PAUD centers to become accredited. An analysis of factors that influence whether and how PAUD centers participate in the accreditation system is helpful to inform continuous quality improvement of Indonesia’s ECED services. The World Bank is providing the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (MoECRT) technical assistance and advice to improve Indonesia’s ECED system. Supported by the Learning for Human Capital Development Programmatic Advisory Services and Analytics (PASA), this study was conducted to inform further improvements to Indonesia’s ECED accreditation system. This report presents the findings from the abovementioned ECED accreditation system assessment and is organized in four main sections after an introduction. Section I describes the study’s background and the country context, with emphasis on the ECED system and its quality assurance mechanisms. Section II details the methodology used. Section III presents a summary of the survey results. Section IV discusses the implications of the findings and outlines recommendations to inform accreditation policies and programs.
  • Publication
    Public Expenditure and Institutional Review and Financial Management in Education Analysis: Preventing a Lost Decade in Education in the Lao PDR
    (Washington, DC, 2024-01-22) World Bank
    The education sector in the Lao PDR (Laos) faces significant challenges. Access to education improved over of the past decade but substantial gaps remain, and previous progress is being undermined by the impacts of COVID-19 and ongoing economic difficulties. The quality of education was already poor before these shocks. The sector is severely underfunded due to a steep decline in public resources allocated to education. In addition, limited job prospects for graduates reduce demand for quality education. To prevent these challenges from causing a lost decade for education in Laos, urgent attention is needed in three areas. First, the government should implement comprehensive economic and fiscal reforms to increase available resources for education and facilitate private sector development to create income earning opportunities for graduates. Second, resource allocation within the sector should be improved for equity and balance. Lastly, the education sector needs to better translate available resources into the learning outcomes of children and youth by reducing inefficiencies and rigidities that constrain the key drivers of learning: teachers, school financing, teaching and learning materials, and school infrastructure. Addressing constraints in these three areas will help reverse the decline in education financing, close access gaps, and enhance service quality.
  • Publication
    Making Teacher Policy Work
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-08) World Bank
    This report zooms into what lies behind the success or failure of teacher policies: how teachers experience these policies, and how systems scale and sustain these policies. The report argues that for policies to be successful, they need to be designed and implemented with careful consideration of the barriers that could hinder teachers’ take-up of the policy (individual-level barriers), and the barriers that could hinder the implementation and sustainability of policies at scale (system-level barriers). Teacher polices too often fail to yield meaningful changes in teaching and learning because both their design and implementation overlook how teachers perceive, understand, and act in response to the policy and because they miss what is needed at a system level to achieve and sustain change. To avoid this, policymakers need to go beyond what works in teacher policy to how to support teachers in different contexts to adopt what works, while making sure it is implementable at scale and can be sustained over time. This requires unpacking teacher policies to consider the barriers that might hinder success at both the individual and system levels, and then putting in place strategies to overcome these barriers. The report proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability. The framework distills insights from behavioral science to identify the barriers that stand in the way of the changes targeted by the policy and to develop strategies to overcome them. The framework is used to examine questions such as: What changes are required at an individual level to achieve the specific goals of a given teacher policy What barriers constrain the adoption of these changes How can the policy be better designed and implemented to tackle these barriers Moreover, the report draws on evidence from quantitative and qualitative studies on successful and failed teacher policies to examine the factors that make teacher policy operationally and politically feasible such that it can work at scale and be sustained over time.
  • Publication
    Use of Assistive Education Technologies to Support Children with Visual and Hearing Difficulties in the East Asia and Pacific Region
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-20) Yarrow, Noah; Song, Chuyu; Bhardwaj, Riaz; Spiezio, Mario
    Evidence on the uptake, use, and impact of EdTech at scale on participation and learning among students with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries remains very limited. This report presents findings on access to EdTech for children with difficulties in hearing and vision in middle-income countries (MICs) in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region using three approaches: (i) a systematic regional literature review; (ii) interviews with 17 actors from the education technology private sector across the EAP region; and (iii) case studies from four countries: Vietnam, the Philippines, China, and Tonga. The main findings from the literature review are that most EdTech solutions in EAP MICs were applied at very small scale, with a focus on the tech testing stage, and only two of the 13 identified studies from a sample of 1,661 studies measured changes in student learning outcomes. The private sector interviews indicate qualitatively that most actors in this space are unaware of the needs of children with vision and hearing disabilities, and that other challenges such as profitability and general inequalities related to access to devices and high-speed internet receive the most attention. The case studies report no examples of national deployment of any assistive education technology, though there are multiple examples of small-scale digital approaches developed by individual schools or NGOs and shared locally or, in two cases, regionally. In looking at country contexts for the case studies, we found a lack of publicly available data on spending for assistive EdTech in EAP, a lack of data on (a) prevalence of disabilities among the student population, (b) student learning, and (c) student persistence in higher grades.
  • Publication
    Using Education Technology to Improve K-12 Student Learning in East Asia Pacific: Promises and Limitations
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-20) Yarrow, Noah; Shen, Sharon; Alyono, Kevin
    We use global and regional data to show that it is possible to use EdTech to improve student learning in EAP. We present evidence that the broadcast/dual teacher model often supports student learning gains, while other approaches, including assistive EdTech, show promise. Others, such as e-readers, remote teacher-training and AI interventions have yet to demonstrate positive impacts on student learning at scale in the EAP context. Based on evidence from the EAP region and globally, we show that as the scale of EdTech interventions increases, the effect on learning generally decreases. The largest impacts tend to come from smaller-scale interventions conducted by non-governmental institutions rather than large-scale interventions by governments. We find that as the use of EdTech expands in the EAP region, it tends to increase existing learning inequalities, since not all families and schools are able to pay for, access, and use it effectively. In this companion paper to the EAP regional flagship “Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific”, we present the results of a regional survey of middle-income countries showing that, contrary to available evidence, most education decision makers believe that EdTech was effective in supporting student learning during COVID-19 school closures. We recommend several evidence-based EdTech interventions in EAP including the “broadcast” or dual–teacher model, and call for improved approaches for future research that consider scale, dosage and heterogeneity of impact to evaluate EdTech interventions.
  • Publication
    Towards Higher Education Excellence in Central Asia: A Roadmap for Improving the Quality of Education and Research through Regional Integration
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-19) Ambasz, Diego; Malinovskiy, Sergey; Olszak-Olszewski, Adrien; Zavalina, Polina; Botero Álvarez, Javier
    The purpose of this Report is to provide recommendations for addressing common challenges while promoting academic and research excellence in higher education in Central Asia through regional cooperation between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Regional integration of higher education systems in Central Asia has the potential to drive positive changes in the sector and to generate significant economic and social benefits overall. By fostering cooperation, knowledge sharing and resource pooling among universities, the quality of higher education, research and innovation in Central Asia can be enhanced. This can be achieved through the establishment of centers of excellence, world-class universities and regional hubs that can attract highly qualified students and workers. Moreover, the regional integration of higher education systems offers an effective platform for sharing best practices and receiving support from regional leaders. The harmonization of academic standards facilitates the recognition of qualifications across countries, contributing to the mobility of students, faculty and workers, enabling them to participate in regional labor markets. This, in turn, stimulates the development of industries that are important to the economies of Central Asian countries. Finally, greater cooperation in higher education can play a crucial role in establishing a dynamic knowledge-based economy and enable Central Asia to move away from extractive industries – to ultimately achieve competitiveness on the global level.
  • Publication
    Using Principles of Universal Design for Assessment (UDA) to Design Accessible Learning Assessments - Toolkit
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-18) World Bank
    The purpose of this toolkit is to generate knowledge on how to develop and adapt assessment tools using principlesof universal design that yield reliable and valid data andinformation to track the learning outcomes of marginalizedlearners, including learners with disabilities.