Why Do Children Fail to Learn?
Children must not only be brought to the classroom, they must receive a quality education every day.
January 02, 2013 by Luis Crouch, RTI International
|
8 minutes read
A classroom full of students ready to listen and learn in the Gambia (c) GPE
Thanks to the good work of TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center we again have fascinating but worrying results. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) released their 2011 results last month. Some of the most dramatic results of these newly released studies are actually contained in the appendices. For example, if you carefully read Appendix G of the TIMSS 2011 International Report in Mathematics, you will learn that, in general, the “average child” in the poorer countries (or sometimes countries with poorer education systems even if the countries are not so poor) are learning at about the same level as the children at the 3rd to 5th percentiles of their OECD counterparts. This means that half the children in those countries learn less than the least-learning 3% or 5% of children in rich countries. And the poor countries participating in these studies are, by a very long shot, not even the poorest countries in the world. In the very poorest countries half of the children are probably below the 3rd percentile in the OECD. This means that about half of the children in all of these countries are essentially learning none of the key mathematics and reading skills they need to be productive citizens. It would be an exaggeration–but not much of one–to say that those children are benefiting from their schooling almost as little as if they were not in school at all. This means that there are some 200 to 250 million children in these countries that are learning close to nothing. This is sobering and scary, since it represents a huge waste of effort, and is tantamount to a violation of these children’s rights to learn. So we have to be grateful for the sobering work of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the countries that have the courage to participate. But we need to figure out how to not just get sobered, but how to improve, and also how to continue to measure better. What are some ideas? To start with, let’s take a look at measurement. The global education sector currently grossly under-invests in the global, regional, and national institutions that worry about, measure, and try to do something about quality. We need to invest far more–and more countries need to participate–in things like TIMSS, PIRLS, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE), the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) and the Programme d’Analyse des Systèmes Educatifs de la CONFEMEN (PASEC). Some of them have appropriate funding for some periods, but as a whole they are under-funded. Then, the institutions that should be tracking these things globally, such as UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) or the Global Monitoring Report (GMR), are also relatively under-funded. Finally, within individual countries, most countries under-fund their own quality monitoring. One option would be to fund more joint work between IEA and PASEC, LLECE, and SACMEQ, to develop globally-linked learning metrics. This can feed into the current good work that Brookings and UIS are doing on the Learning Metrics Task Force. But we also need to do more to actually use these measurements. Most countries do not even use the measurement results they already have. Formal discussions between countries and donors are not sufficiently focused on whether children receive a quality education, and as a result, about half of the children learn nearly nothing. Or, when there are such discussions, they mostly rely on conventional wisdom and recipes that don’t work and not on solid evidence of what does work. This was something the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) highlighted in its Results for Learning study which was released last month. One last point is that many of the problems in learning that TIMSS and PIRLS detect start early. The problems begin when the children are as young as 5 or 6 due to severely faulty instruction (or even poor childhood care, but certainly, and in a manner that can be addressed, poor instruction in the year prior to grade 1 and in the early grades). There is increasing evidence that this can be addressed, but it is not yet being addressed well enough. Here in these early grades, there is a good link between (appropriate) measurement and instruction. And one could also fund more research by linking the sorts of assessments that TIMSS and PIRLS can do with other assessments that can be done in the early grades to prevent later failure. More analysis needs to be done on whether and how assessments that can be done with the littlest children are useful in predicting and improving how they perform, later, in assessments such as TIMSS and PIRLS. GPE would like to encourage that kind of work, perhaps through UIS. Don’t forget to check out the newly released Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011 data! This is the first time that TIMSS and PIRLS have been administered in the same year, providing an incredible wealth of data for policymakers and researchers in developed and developing countries alike. The TIMSS data are for 600,000 students in 63 countries and 14 benchmarking entities; the PIRLS data cover 300,000 students in 49 countries and 9 benchmarking entities. Find out who topped the charts! Discover some surprising new top performers (Northern Ireland, for one). You can access the reports and lots more, including videos and trend data, at the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center website: http://timss.bc.edu/ By Luis Crouch

Related blogs

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Plain text

  • Global and entity tokens are replaced with their values. Browse available tokens.
  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.