Publication: Mexico : Determinants of Learning Policy Note
Loading...
Published
2005-07
ISSN
Date
2012-06-18
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This report aims to identify the determinants of learning in Mexico, focusing on equity, cross-country comparisons and national studies. The present report provides new analytical work on the determinants of learning using international and national assessments, as well as new work on the returns to quality of education and an assessment of media coverage of international assessments. The report is organized as follows: Chapter 1 reviews the existing international and Mexican literature on education quality and the determinants of learning. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the state of education in Mexico. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of the National Assessments (Estandures Nacionales) from 1998 to 2000 and the results of the analysis of PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 data. Finally, Chapter 4 concludes the main report with an agenda for action, which responds to the education situation in Mexico. The report's main message is that Mexico needs to increase secondary school enrollment rates. The country continues to do well at maintaining equity in terms of the impact of family background on scores and the very low dispersion between top and bottom achievers, which is unusual for a Latin American country participating in international achievement tests. To improve quality, Mexican schools need to improve the school climate and continue efforts to move decision-making from the state level education secretariats to the school level, thus increasing school autonomy. Also, accountability needs to be further strengthened by involving parents and the community more and setting clear goals and clear vision for the school system. Finally, Mexico's remarkable efforts to improve assessment of the system should continue, with continued participation in international achievement tests, as well as improvements of the national assessment system.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2005. Mexico : Determinants of Learning Policy Note. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/8284 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Quality of education in Colombia - Achievements and challenges ahead : analysis of the results of TIMSS 1995-2007(World Bank, 2010-08-06)The main objective of this report is to analyze the effect of time changes and factors associated with student achievement in Colombia in order to foster policies to improve education quality that are grounded in research and the Colombian context. In 2007, Colombia participated for the second time in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), providing a first-time opportunity to analyze the effects of time changes on student achievement over a period (1995-2007) during which a number of education reforms were made. Using the TIMSS 2007 results offers a chance to deepen the study on the factors associated with learning in Colombia and to benchmark Colombia's education system against that of other countries. This effort began during the first phase of the Colombia Programmatic Quality and Relevance of Education Analytic and Advisory Activities (AAA), in which an analysis of Colombia's debut in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), resulted in publication of, 'the quality of education in Colombia: an analysis and options for a policy agenda' report (hereafter, 'PISA report'). The present report builds on this work through an analysis of Colombia's participation in TIMSS 2007 in relation to its performance on TIMSS 1995, and reaffirms the urgent need for improved student learning outcomes in Colombia, further confirming a number of the policy options put forward in the PISA report to inform a future agenda for system design and reform.Publication Learning Essentials for International Education(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-03-23)The sound of children's voices reciting in unison could be heard from afar, as our mission approached a school in rural Cambodia. Inside a second-grade classroom, students took turns at the blackboard. One pointed with a stick at a list of words written by the teacher, while the rest recited. A colleague approached, wrote on the blackboard the same words in a different order, and asked the children to read. Suddenly, there was silence. Most kids had merely memorized the sequence of the words and could not even identify single letters. This scene is frequent. In the poorer schools of low-income countries, many students remain illiterate for years, until they finally drop out. With some care, the process is observable. Typically the teacher writes on the board some letters or words and asks students to repeat them. The letters may be scribbled, the children often sit at a distance, textbooks may be insufficient, and children may not have anyone at home to help them read. But they do repeat the words in unison, getting cues from a few knowledgeable classmates. The teachers stand by the blackboard, address students at large, and call on the few who perform well. How come this issue has not attracted attention? One reason is that in the middle-class schools of capitals students perform much better. Soon after our rural observations, we observed second graders in a middleclass school of Pnom Penh fluently handling the extremely complex Khmer script. However, the schools of the poor have less time for their students. There is teacher absenteeism, a lack of textbooks to take home, parental inability to make up for school weaknesses, no specific curricular time for reading. The result has been chronic illiteracy, high dropout and high repetition rates. To reduce repetition and maximize enrollments, some donors advise governments to promote students automatically.Publication How Can Bulgaria Improve Its Education System? An Analysis of PISA 2012 and Past Results(Washington, DC, 2012-09-26)Bulgaria's performance on all three disciplines of the program for international student assessment (PISA) 2012 was slightly better than its PISA 2000 performance, after having dropped between 2000 and 2006. The improvements in performance between 2006 and 2012 promoted shared prosperity, but equality of opportunities is still a major challenge. In fact, disaggregating students' PISA scores across a number of variables for example, location and ethnicity - shows that large inequalities exist in Bulgaria's education system. Peer characteristics and school segregation are the key drivers of the Bulgarian education system's performance. An in-depth analysis into math and reading skills shows imbalances in performance in Bulgaria. The main areas in which Bulgaria can further improve its educational system involve: delaying the tracking of students to reduce segregation in schools; continue improving the quality of educational resources to ensure that all students learn in an environment with books, lab equipment, and technological hardware and software; encouraging longer pre-primary education for all children; learning from successful schools to improve accountability mechanisms for schools countrywide, particularly in rural areas; reevaluating the curriculum and assessment framework to better align student learning to the envisaged country goals; and promoting effective classroom management and strengthening teaching practices.Publication Findings from the Bhutan Learning Quality Survey(Washington, DC, 2009-01)The education sector in Bhutan has been growing steadily since the 1960s and concomitantly the literacy rates of the population have also been steadily going up over time. The mostly mountainous country regards education as central to its national development. Every cohort has seen an increasing share of children going to school and the education system now strains to keep up with the speed with which enrolment has expanded over the last ten years, in-line with Bhutan's commitment to meet the education Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This report is structured as follows: section two presents the background and context of Bhutan's education system; section three discusses previous theoretical and empirical literature on education quality; section four describes the sampling design methodology, the sample and empirical methodology used in this study; section five presents findings on students' actual knowledge in three subjects and their corresponding scaled scores; section six presents the results of multivariate regression analysis for estimating school, teacher and child related correlates of learning outcomes; section seven profiles teachers in grades two and four and the education process; and section eight concludes with brief summary, discussion of policy implications, and recommendation for future research.Publication Colombia - The Quality of Education in Colombia : An Analysis and Options for a Policy Agenda(Washington, DC, 2008-11-04)The main objective of this report is to analyze student learning in Colombia in order to foster policies to improve education quality that are grounded in research and the Colombian context. In 2006, Colombia participated for the first time in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which provides an important opportunity to benchmark the quality and equity of its education system globally and to inform its education policy. Using the PISA results, this report calls attention to the need for improved student learning in Colombia and provides new analytical work on the factors associated with learning in Colombia and other participant countries. Based on an assessment of the current state of the Colombian education system (chapter first), a review of the relevant literature (chapter second), an analysis of PISA (chapter third), and the report concludes with a set of policy options that may inform a future agenda for system design and reform (chapter fourth).
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Assessing Gender Gaps in Employment and Earnings in Africa(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07)Persistent gender gaps characterize labor markets in many African countries. Utilizing Eswatini’s first three labor market surveys (conducted in 2007, 2010, and 2013), this paper provides first systematic evidence on the country’s gender gaps in employment and earnings. We find that women have notably lower employment rates and earnings than men, even though the global financial crisis had a less negative impact on women than it had on men. Both unadjusted and unexplained gender earnings gaps are higher in self-employment than in wage employment. Tertiary education and urban location account for a large part of the gender earnings gap and mitigate high female propensity to self-employment. Our findings suggest that policies supporting female higher education and rural-urban mobility could reduce persistent inequalities in Eswatini’s labor market outcomes as well as in other middle-income countries in southern Africa.Publication Developing Digital Payment Services in the Middle East and North Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-16)This report discusses strengthening the provision of payment services in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as an essential step to integrate their economies into the world of ‘digital finance and digital economy’ and to support economic development. The report elaborates a strategic approach to the development of sound and dynamic ecosystems for the provision of digital payment services (DPS) as foundations for effective financial digitalization and development of digital economy in MENA countries. The report is not about intervening in the MENA region through a coordinated regional strategic plan; rather, it describes what MENA countries should do to modernize their DPS ecosystems, starting from their own initial conditions. To this purpose, it identifies steps that are tailored to those initial conditions and delineates a strategic approach that national authorities may consider when designing their own strategy for modernizing DPS.Publication Niger : Food Security and Safety Nets(Washington, DC, 2009-02-18)Niger is a very poor country that faces serious problems of poverty and household food insecurity. With a per capita gross national income (GNI) of US$240 and an estimated 62 percent of the population living below the poverty line, Niger is one of the lowest-ranked countries on the United Nations' human development index. Reducing vulnerability and ensuring food and nutrition security is an overarching priority for the Government. Maintaining food security at the national and household level is an important priority for developing countries in general, both for the welfare of the poor and for political stability. In order to ensure food security, governments have adopted various strategies, including efforts to increase staple food crop production, market interventions, and a variety of safety net programs, especially during emergencies. In Niger, where profound vulnerabilities combined with a high level of population growth have resulted in endemic food insecurity, the Government is faced with a serious challenge. In this context, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the existing strategy and assist the Government in developing a holistic, multi-sectoral, and institutional approach to reducing the population's vulnerability to food insecurity. This report adds value to the ongoing policy discussions in two ways: first, it presents new empirical analysis of: i) food insecurity and vulnerability of households during the period of food crises as well as during normal period, ii) the structure and integration of cereal markets within Niger and with markets in neighboring countries, and iii) causes of the 2005 food crisis, and lessons learned on implications of various levels of cross-border flows between Niger and Nigeria. Second, it provides concrete short- and medium-term recommendations for helping government to improve the performance of existing programs to increase food security, particularly related to preparedness for and responses to food crises, and to design efficient safety nets mechanisms for vulnerable population.Publication How Do Banks Serve SMEs? Business and Risk Management Models(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)This study describes the business and risk management practices that banks use to serve small and medium enterprises (SMEs). To do so, we use recently collected evidence from Argentina and Chile for a significant number of banks in each country, gathered through on-site meetings, a tabulated questionnaire, and a detailed data request. We find that banks are setting up separate departments to serve the segment, targeting many SMEs from all economic sectors and geographic regions. Banks use relationship managers to seek out new clients. Risk management and loan approval is separate from sales, mostly centralized, but not largely automated. Knowing the client is still crucial to minimize risks. Overall, the patterns we uncover suggest that banks are in the middle of an on-going learning process, by which they are developing the structure to deal with SMEs in a sustainable basis over the coming years.