Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
How did children learn while schools were closed during 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers, using a randomized controlled trial with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.
The heart of Girin Beeharry’s manifesto is that we must reorient global aid for education around promoting foundational literacy and numeracy, unflinchingly monitor progress on that core goal, and hold all development institutions accountable for measurable results in this domain. In this collection, sector leaders, researchers, and practitioners provide their reflections and counter proposals to Girin’s essay.
Students around the world lack foundational literacy and numeracy skills at striking rates. This essay examines the potential channels by which FLN investments and skills—which most systems teach in the early grades of primary school—may impact later schooling and subsequent life outcomes and the existing evidence for each channel. We find suggestive evidence for widening trajectories in school between students who master FLN skills in early grades and those who do not, although other factors may also explain the widening gaps.
GPE’s unique selling point is its single-minded focus on basic education, and its fairly streamlined, no-strings-attached approach to funding poor countries’ own education plans. But is GPE the best channel for education aid?
Using a phone survey of 1,211 households in Pakistan, we examine the effects of COVID-19 on three key domains: education, economic, and health-related.
Most governments around the world have temporarily closed schools in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As they start to plan for reopening, we have compiled a series of short and accessible briefs that provide the best available rigorous evidence on five critical dimensions of school reopening and recovery.
In this article, we draw on our pilot testing of phone-based assessments in Botswana, along with the existing literature on oral testing of reading and mathematics, to propose a series of preliminary practical lessons to guide researchers and service providers as they try phone-based learning assessments. We provide preliminary evidence that phone-based assessments can accurately capture basic numeracy skills.
COVID-19 school closures pose significant operational and financial risks to frontline organizations delivering vital education services, including non-governmental organizations, school operators, and other service providers. In this survey, we ask these organizations about the challenges they are facing in light of COVID-19 closures, particularly for girls. The responses shed light on how COVID-19 is affecting education service operations—and what providers are doing in response.
It’s tricky to evaluate government education policies. Using the examples of three rigorous studies of three different education policies, this note aims to shed some light from the perspective of someone on the policy side on how, why, and when to evaluate government-led reforms.
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