Brief

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured the effectiveness of both financial and non-financial incentives at the student, classroom, and school levels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A new classroom routine was designed to encourage all grades 5 and 6 students to take home a classroom textbook and use it to study for a weekly quiz.

Teach is an observation tool that captures: (i) the time teachers spend on learning and the extent to which students are on task, and (ii) the quality of teaching practices that help develop students’ socio-emotional and cognitive skills.

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded the development of a Management & Information System to monitor the quality of the education system in Colombia. This system builds on existing monitoring tools, which focus on outcome measures such as test scores but do not capture intermediate quality indicators that can shed light on how learning outcomes are achieved.

In this short note, we summarize findings from a forthcoming analysis for 39 countries with unusually large over-enrollment in the early primary grades. We investigate the scope of the problem, the underlying causes and some potential solutions. Our analysis reveals that this over-enrollment is explained primarily by excessive, sustained repetition in the early grades. This pattern results in substantial system inefficiencies and wastage. We discuss policy implications related to expansion of pre-primary education, improvement of quality in the early grades and allocation of resources. 

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded an evaluation that measured the effectiveness of both financial and non-financial incentives at the student, classroom, and school levels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A new classroom routine was designed to encourage all grades 5 and 6 students to take home a classroom textbook and use it to study for a weekly quiz.

Early Childhood Development (ECD) and skills development are both areas of increasing priority for countries around the world seeking to boost economic growth and stability. There is considerable demand for technical and financial support to expand and improve the quality of programs in these two areas, and both are central to achieving the World Bank’s twin goals of boosting shared prosperity and ending poverty.

Indonesian secondary students perform worse academically than their peers in other countries, especially boys. In the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Indonesia ranked among the worse of the 72 participating countries. More than half of 15-year-olds could read a text but could not answer simple questions related to it; that was only the case of 14 percent of students in high-performing Vietnam and 20 percent in member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

To ensure that children arrive in primary school ready to learn, policymakers around the world are increasingly focusing on what happens in preprimary education programs and whether childrenare developing the skills needed for primary school. But properly structuring preprimary programs and ensuring teachers are prepared requires the right training and curricula development. In some cases, it also may be necessary to help parents understand how preprimary programs, such as preschools, can best improve learning in a developmentally appropriate way.

Teach is an observation tool that captures: (i) the time teachers spend on learning and the extent to which students are on task, and (ii) the quality of teaching practices that help develop students’ socio-emotional and cognitive skills.

Teach is an open source classroom observation tool that provides a window into one of the less explored and more important aspects of a student’s education: what goes on in the classroom. The tool is intended to be used in primary classrooms (grades 1-6) and was designed to help low- and middle-income countries track and improve teaching quality.