2.6.1 Organisational issues
2.6.2 Achievement and automatic promotion
2.6.3 Assessment and examinations
2.6.4 Alternative delivery strategies
Ways of organising and providing educational services vary widely. The key policy question is which organisational and pedagogical reforms have the most potential to improve internal efficiency without loss in quality. Three preliminary observations provide a starting point.
First, the number of school days is not a constant between countries. For example, in the 23 IEA science study countries (Postlethwaite and Wiley 1991) the number of teaching days in the year for 10 year olds varied from 158 in Ghana to 220 in Korea a variation of nearly 40%. When it is realised that the number of teaching hours a day also varies independently - perhaps by as much as 2:1 - the range of instructional time formally available to students may vary by a factor of two and probably by more (the length of the teaching year in the 23 IEA countries varies between 672 hours (Hungary) and 1134 hours (Nigeria) with a modal value around 950 hours. The teaching loads of teachers are also unevenly distributed in some countries these may exceed 30 hours a week in double shift schools with the majority of this time being spent in contact with children, in others loads of three or four periods a day are common, amounting to about 10 to 15 hours teaching a week. Teacher class ratios span the range from less than one to as much as 2.5:1 in more favoured institutions. The number of non-teaching staff on school payrolls also varies from minimal allocations, to numbers that can be comparable with the number of teachers. These facts suggest that there may be opportunities to increase internal efficiency through changed working practices.
Second, far fewer days may actually be available for teaching than those which are allocated. The actual number of normal teaching days in rural primary schools may be anywhere between 10% and 30% less than the official number. The reasons commonly include:
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loss of teaching days at the beginning of the school year and school terms for registration of new and returning students school refurbish-meet/cleaning etc. a week or more for administering public examinations when normal teaching is disrupted (often more in school with secondary grades) special school events - sports days, school exhibitions, visits by dignitaries extended public holidays leave and teacher absenteeism. |
Thus the World Bank has estimated that teacher classroom attendances are only 70% of the level they would be if all teachers taught on all teaching days in Shri Lanka (World Bank 1989b). In a recent study of schools in an Autonomous Prefecture in China more than half the students in senior grades of primary school were found to be absent on days when field workers visited schools (Lewin, Wang et al 1994). Clearly higher teacher attendance coupled with full utilisation of teaching days would significantly increase the hours of instruction available and might reduce the number of teachers needed. It should also improve student achievement assuming there is some relationship between this and the amount of teaching received. Community teachers in the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee non formal primary education project have very low absenteeism despite being in poor rural communities. The administrative arrangements are such that unexplained absences result in loss of pay; when absence occurs substitute community teachers are utilised (Lovell and Fatema 1989).
Seasonal absenteeism is common in rural areas during planting and harvest times. The effects of this on learning achievement may be lessened if learning is planned in blocks lasting a few weeks which are complete learning experiences in themselves. Where student absenteeism is high, and reductions in it are unlikely in the short term, curriculum planning which assumes that school experience is not necessarily continuous might therefore bring benefits.
Third, the organisation of teaching and learning typically involves students remaining in whole class groups during all teaching hours. The amount of time spent by students working without direct supervision during school hours is usually small. Where it happens it is more often a product of teacher absenteeism than of design. Yet much useful learning does not depend on the continuous presence of a teacher. Opportunities to exploit peer group learning, self study, and the involvement older children in collaborative learning with younger children, are often under utilised. Practice differs greatly in the extent to which community resources are mobilised to supervise and assist with learning.
Many countries have had experience of projects that seek to enhance access and maintain quality through changes in the organisation of teaching and learning. Project Impact is one of the most well known of these. From its origins in the Philippines and Indonesia derivatives have spread to Malaysia,' Jamaica, Liberia and Bangladesh. The project uses self instructional material and peer group learning strategies which include older children teaching younger children. The original goals of Project Impact included increasing student teacher ratios to as much as 150:1. Though it is clear that these projects have had positive outcomes, cost savings have generally been less than originally anticipated. In the Philippines 40%. cost savings were projected as a result of fewer teachers and more use of self-instructional materials but did not take materialise. Part of the problem was that those savings which were made produced no financial benefits to the schools. In the Liberian project unit costs for project schools exceeded those for ordinary schools as school size remained too small for economies of scale to become apparent. In Indonesia there were useful cost savings but these were less than initially planned. Materials costs per student were 25% higher than in conventional schools, though this was offset by lower staff costs with the result that overall savings in recurrent unit costs of between 2 and 12 per cent were achieved (Cummings 1986).
The evaluation studies of the Impact projects indicate that learning achievement does not necessarily suffer if reductions are made in the time students spend with teachers provided that self instruction and peer learning opportunities are used as a substitute. There are many other projects which use changes in the organisation and delivery of teaching to reach out of school children. Several of these have succeeded in reducing unit costs by employing educated community members who are given short introductory training courses and are paid at rates below those of government teachers. Two examples of this are the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee's non-formal primary education project and the Shiksha Karmi project in Rajasthan. In both of these achievement levels are comparable or better than in government schools in the same areas (Lovell and Fatema 1989, Anandalakshmy 1991). Lewin with Stewart (1991) provide more case study examples of attempts at planned change which vary delivery systems.
A further observation is important. Planned learning is defined by curricula goals and evidenced by the achievement of these. Many mass education systems are based on the assumption of linear progression through successive grades where what is taught and learned in one year is extended and deepened at the next. In principle this cumulative model of learning ought to result in higher and higher levels of achievement through the school system. The evidence from achievement studies and from the raw score performance of students in many systems is disquieting. Failure to master large proportions of the curriculum at a given level is widespread and is demonstrated by the fact that significant numbers of students score at levels obtainable by chance on multiple choice tests even after several years of instruction. In the IEA science study the bottom 20% of 14 year old students in Ghana, Nigeria, the Philippines and Zimbabwe scored close to these levels (Postlethwaite and Wiley 1991). It would not be surprising to find similar results at younger ages. Some recent small scale research on mathematics achievement in Shri Lanka seems to suggest that mathematics achievement in a sample of schools at grade 6 and 7 is little better than that in grade 5 when similar test items are administered. Achievement data requires careful interpretation but these kinds of results will not surprise examiners in many countries who are accustomed to performance figures on public examinations which indicate little achievement gain amongst large numbers of candidates. If curricula in successive grades are based on the assumption of mastery of the lower levels of which many students have at best a poor grasp, then later learning problems are inevitable. Far from being progressive, learning may become more of a cycle of cumulative ignorance where at each level smaller and smaller proportions of what is supposed to be learned have actually been mastered.
In many countries there are subjects which are passed by small proportions of candidates, sometimes as few as 1020%, after completing an educational cycle. Where the assessment tests are technically well conceived, the problems must reside in a combination of ineffective teaching and unrealistic curriculum goals. In such circumstances it must be attractive to identify curricula goals which are within reach of the majority of children in typical schools with typical teachers. It is then possible to emphasise those learning outcomes that are thought to be essential to all or most of the school population, and to concentrate resources on their achievement. Contrary to popular opinions, curriculum development of this kind, which emphasises mastery of learning goals, does not lower standards. The achieved standards in many school systems are already low and setting goals that are demonstrably unattainable to the majority is often the cause of poor performance. The objection that lowering over ambitious-achievement goals would hamper the level of achievement of the most able students can be countered through the introduction of express promotion streams. This, incidentally, would result in a release of school places that could be made available to those not currently enrolled. Curricula reforms of the kinds suggested are a precondition for successful implementation of automatic promotion. In systems where repetition is high the introduction of automatic promotion is one of the most effective ways of improving internal efficiency and may, incidentally, reduce the propensity to drop out.
Considerable research has been conducted on examination systems and their impact on teaching and learning. This can only be referred to briefly here. A central theme running through this work is that expressed in the Diploma Disease (Dore 1976), namely that the later a country develops, the more likely educational qualifications will be used as the dominant mechanism to allocate jobs, and that this will have deleterious effects on the quality of education. Learning to do a job may be replaced by learning to get a job. Interest and curiosity may be stifled by the narrow demands to learn for the examination, curricula will only stress that which is examinable, and students teachers and parents will sacrifice inordinate amounts of effort, time and money to maximise their chances of passing examination tasks which may have tenuous relationships with useful life skills. The successful will be blighted by socialisation towards instrumental patterns of motivation and learning for the test alone. The failures will suffer the double jeopardy of being certified incapable and of having experienced an educational diet of little use to them since its form has been determined by the narrow demands of academic selection.
The basic evidence supporting these kind of propositions is widespread. Little's 1978 analysis of IEA data illustrated that the four developing countries (Iran, Chile, Thailand and India) in the sample ranked amongst the first six out of 15 countries on an indication of the frequent use of tests. An analysis of examination papers from most East and West African countries in the early 1980's (ILO/JASPA 1981) showed that the quality of examination papers was very variable, many being unlikely to satisfy technical criteria of reliability and validity. It also illustrated that much that was tested consisted of the recall of information with little emphasis on higher order skills, even in subjects in like science where much curriculum material stressed the acquisition of reasoning skills. A synthesis of studies from five developing countries (Ghana, Mexico, Shri Lanka, China, and Malaysia) showing how assessment practices affected teaching and learning and how patterns of use of educational qualifications in labour markets could result in qualification escalation and inefficient selection practices was provided in Oxenham (ed) 1984. The SLOG project (SLOG 1987) reports the results of a six country study (India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Shri Lanka, Japan and England) which begins to chart the relationships between various types of assessment orientation and the possible negative long term effects of this on interest, motivation, innovativeness and the use of problem solving skills. Expenditure on private tuition in many countries has been rising rapidly sometimes to levels comparable with or greater than public expenditures per child. This is an indication of growing levels of concern with examination success and may have detrimental effects on ordinary schooling (e.g. teacher's putting more time and energy into private tuition activities which generate substantial additional incomes, children studying for 10 or more hours a day).
Little's (1992) updated review of the literature on the Diploma Disease collects together recent work and draws attention to refinements of the arguments which stress that the Diploma Disease is best regarded as a social rather than individual pathology with roots in established educational structures, the level of bureaucratisation in society and the historical depth of social class divisions. Dore now argues that Japan is likely to retain its economic pre-eminence despite the "examination hell" of schooling in Japan. This is possible, he suggests, because work structures may be sufficient to offset some of the adverse effects of over concentration on examinations. It is also because the Japanese technical and scientific elite have been insulated from the worst effects of examination orientation. Dore nevertheless now condudes that "the chief victims of an examination dominated schooling are likely to be those who are bright without being the brightest, those who are within sight of whatever are socially defined as desirable prizes in the competition but by no means certain of reaching them without a great deal of anxious effort". Though recent work has not confirmed simple relationships between assessment orientation and work orientations, there does seem to be an association between interest orientations to learning and creativity and problem solving at work (Little and Singh 1992). Moreover it seems possible that different types of assessment practices have differential propensities to facilitate interest orientation, though this remains to be demonstrated on larger samples than have been researched.
The experience of attempts to abandon national examining systems in favour of other methods of selection -as in China during the Cultural Revolution seems unlikely to provide a way forward for many countries. Unger's (1982) analysis exposes many of the problems that arose during this period. China has returned to a familiar system of national and provincial examining and the "sea of items" has reappeared as a common epithet to describe the experience of secondary schooling. A unified entrance examination for University entrance has been adopted and many of the characteristics of backwash from this into the school system are becoming apparent (Lewin and Wang Lu 1991).
Some promising developments have occurred with the introduction of various forms of school based and continuous assessment which have been introduced partly to lessen stress on public examinations. Pennycuidk (1989:139-152) reviews attempts to introduce continuous assessment in Shri Lanka, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles and Nigeria and finds systems ranging from the total replacement of external exams, to parallel systems of continuous assessment and external exams, and to systems where continuous assessment forms a component of final results, together with external examination results. The much greater involvement of teachers in the assessment of students in these systems is obvious. But there has been a wealth of difference between the systems planned operation and the practice in reality as the Nigerian experience illustrates. Nwakoby (1988) highlights major problem areas which include inadequate conceptualisation by teachers, doubtful validity of assessment, and inadequate structural and administrative support. Attempts to introduce continuous assessment schemes in some countries have floundered in the face of practical problems and the opposition of groups who see few real benefits emerging and much extra work (e.g. Shri Lanka). In other cases complete dependence on school-based examining moderated by national rating examinations has been replaced by a mixed system that cumulates internal and external examination scores together (Papua New Guinea). There is some suggestive evidence from Papua New Guinea that schools where correlations between internal assessment and the external rating examination are lower, (Ross 1992 cited in Lewin 1992:110) perform better than those where the correlations are high. It is most likely that examination orientation is least where the correlation is lowest and internal tests measure a different range of outcomes to external assessment.
A number of countries have begun to develop their capacity to analyse performance on examinations and feed insights from this back into the school system. Somerset's work in Kenya in the early 1980's is a well known example of this (Somerset 1982). The Examination department in Papua New Guinea issues comprehensive analyses of examination performance to schools which provide indications of which areas students performance is weakest. This kind of data, both on school performance as a whole, and on individual item response patterns, is a potentially invaluable source of data for planning and intervention decisions. The problem is generally either that the data collection and analysis system is unable to provide such information in countries where infrastructure is weak, or that very limited use is made of the information since its distribution is restricted and its presentation too technical for many of those with access to it. A recent paper by Eisemon (1990) explores examination policies to strengthen primary schooling in African countries.
A new analysis of science examination data in Malaysia (Lewin and Sharifah Maimunah 1994) illustrates how new insights can emerge from reanalysing examination data. In this study some science items were identified which were relatively easier for rural students despite the fact that there mean scores were well below the national average. Under performance of rural students therefore appears to be concentrated in particular areas of the science curriculum and it is teaching and learning in these that invites intervention strategies, rather than in all areas of the science curriculum. Similarly analysis of the performance of a sample of girls with similar overall scores to those of boys showed that scores were being achieved in different ways some areas appeared easier for girls and others considerably more difficult. This suggests girls performance could be improved by attention to learning problems in a few specific areas of science. The research also shed light on another possible aspect of the over emphasis on examination results. There appear to be different strategies employed by schools to attract public recognition. In some overall pass rates are stressed, in others the proportion of the highest scoring students who gain the top grades is of most concern. The former approach may lead to the relative neglect of high achieving students, the latter to too much stress on the most able at the expense of other students.
In countries which have centralised examining systems where there is considerable emphasis on examination results improvements in the quality and content of assessment instruments are attractive for three main reasons. First examination reform may be the most cost effective way to change patterns of teaching and learning within the limitations of what can imaginatively be examined. Second, improvements in the quality, relevance and technical adequacy of selection examinations is likely to be a priority. If these conditions are not met then those who are selected may not be either fairly identified or the best suited for the jobs or further courses to which they have been chosen. Third, research on examination performance at regional, school and individual level is a critical element in understanding the effects of previous policy reform on achievement and in making decisions designed to lead to further improvements in access, equity and the outcomes of schooling.
Though much has been written about the prospects for enrolling more students outside conventional formal school systems there is only patchy evidence on the experience of this. Non-formal and out-of-school programmes are notoriously difficult to cost and evaluate. Their forms are very varied, sources of support may be extremely diverse and of uncertain value, successful completion rates and achievement data are often unavailable, the programmes themselves are often transient, and target groups are often not clearly defined. Studies which have tried to compare the cost effectiveness of adult education have run into irresolvable problems arising from these factors (e.g. Carr-Hill and Lintott 1985).
There is some evidence on cost-effectiveness relating to systems that have adopted various forms of distance learning, another widely promoted alternative delivery system. These most commonly include multimedia open university systems, correspondence colleges and radio learning. In most cases these have not supplanted the formal systems that exist alongside them, rather they are complementary, satisfying demand that cannot be met through existing institutions. Sixteen distance teaching projects, about half of which are at tertiary level, are reviewed in Perraton (ed) 1986. Open University programmes seem to have lower costs per graduate than conventional enrolments, though there are almost as many cases where costs are thought to be comparable with some existing institutions. Amongst the secondary level programmes reviewed, several are more expensive per completed graduate than normal schools, although the majority appear to be cheaper. Completion rates are crucial to these calculations, yet these are often not easy to discover. It can be concluded that well designed and effectively implemented distance learning can offer lower unit costs. This can allow greater access to secondary and post-secondary courses but has little or no impact on the resources available for primary schools.
Studies of out of school learning indicate that there are a wide range of methods through which young learners can acquire useful knowledge. There are many ad hoc arrangements of the informal apprenticeship variety and many countries have institutionalised various community based education programmes that, to a greater or lesser extent, shadow the formal system (Lewin and Jones 1985). These are rarely given high priority by governments coping with severe under funding of the formal system, since they have less political visibility. Employers may also be wary of supporting out of school schemes unless they have some guarantee that those trained through them will use their skills within the enterprise that sponsors them. Where skills are job specific these kind of schemes seem to be most successful. There is considerable unsatisfied demand for sources of knowledge outside the formal school system and much potential in exploring the best vectors through which this can be delivered. As with distance education, these opportunities are most widespread at the post-primary level.
There are examples of successful alternative delivery systems. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) has organised a non-formal primary education programme since 1985. This focuses on children who have been deprived of access to normal primary schools as a result of poverty and particularly encourages girls to enrol. In 1989 2,500 schools were functioning and a further 2000 were planned (Lovell and Fatema 1989:32). By 1992 the number had risen to 6,200 schools (Lovell 1992:50). These schools offer a three year programme for 8 to 10 year olds and a two year programme for 11 to 14 year olds and are completely free.
Teachers for these schools are recruited from local communities and given 12 days initial training followed by monthly training sessions. They are paid a stipend of about US$ 10 month (1989) which is about one third of that for a government teacher. Preliminary evaluations (Lovell and Fatema 1989) suggest that the cost per student is about US$ 15 per year, excluding the contributions that communities make to the maintenance of the classroom facilities and any opportunity costs arising from school attendance. The programme is supported by four international donors and BRACs own resources. The drop out of students appears to be very low (1 to 2%) and a very high proportion of those following the programme for 8 to 10 year olds (95%) are entering grade 4 of government secondary schools. Evidence on achievement levels suggests that these are comparable with those of students in government schools. BRAC has also been involved in a facilitation assistance programme to upgrade government primary schools in four districts. Here improvements have occurred but drop-out and absenteeism remain much higher than in BRAC schools and pedagogical changes have been much more difficult to introduce (Lovell 1992:57). The BRAC experience seems to illustrate that it is possible for alternative systems to work effectively at low cost with students who would not otherwise be enrolled. It remains the case that BRAC schools are not replacing normal provision, but successfully supplementing it for groups to whom it has not been available.
