Learning achievement and education system reform in low- and middle-income countries

Kaffenberger, Michelle (2024) Learning achievement and education system reform in low- and middle-income countries. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The world has long committed to ensuring a quality education for every child (United Nations 1948). Yet, while school enrolments have increased dramatically over the past 50 years, learning has remained low; many children who are in school are not achieving even basic learning outcomes. The nine papers being submitted towards this PhD by Publication make four main contributions: they develop and employ new methods to study children’s learning achievements, assess the consequences of poor learning for later life outcomes, propose new ways to model key policy choices to improve learning, and investigate the role of system coherence for improving learning outcomes. First, I analyse data using learning trajectories, rather than the standard approach of using single point-in-time learning outcomes, to study children’s learning as they progress through school. Second, I investigate the role of learning in later life outcomes, including women’s fertility, empowerment, and child mortality. Third, I develop a structural model of the learning process and use it to model education policy outcomes. The model suggests that achieving universal grade 10 completion would produce little literacy gain as children are too far behind to gain much learning from the additional years. However, slowing the pace of the curriculum to better match children’s pace of learning could increase learning levels by the equivalent of 1.6 years of schooling. Fourth, I investigate the role of education system coherence in driving learning outcomes. I use the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum to quantify instructional misalignments in Uganda and Tanzania, and an education system diagnostic approach to describe reform coherence in Brazil and Indonesia. Taken together, these papers contribute to the emerging field of systems thinking in international education research.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Depositing User:	Nicola Veasy
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2024 13:35
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2024 13:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97330
DOI:

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