Outsmarting your parents: Being a first‐generation learner in developing countries

Abstract

We use data from the Young Lives surveys, in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, to highlight an underappreciated phenomenon—that a substantial proportion of students in developing countries are the first in their families to go to school. We term these students first‐generation learners (FGLs). We both propose a simple “static” definition of FGL status—where a child’s parents have no education attainment—and utilize the panel dynamics of the Young Lives data set to look at a “dynamic” definition—where the child, in any given round of data collection, is enrolled at a level which his or her parents did not reach. We show descriptive statistics on the scale of this problem across the four countries. We find strong, consistent patterns of relative educational deprivation for FGLs. We tentatively explore the pathways through which FGL status may affect outcomes and find possible explanations through an inability to support with homework and lower aspirations. We look at how becoming an FGL affects the probability of being in school using child fixed‐effects estimations and find it increases the vulnerability of children to drop out.

Child stunting starts in utero: Growth trajectories and determinants in Ugandan infants

“…The study's legacy, which also demonstrated the value of longitudinal designs, is rooted in follow‐up surveys that traced index participants several decades later (Martorell et al, 1995). A more recent example that harnessed the power of longitudinal approaches was the Young Lives Study (YL; Boyden, 2016) conducted in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, which followed 12,000 children over 15 years to determine lasting nutrition impacts on early health insults and poverty (Cueto et al, 2020; Favara & Hoeffler, 2020; Portela & Atherton, 2020). Although informative, these kinds of studies focused on the analyses of means for specific outcomes of the population under study but did not determine if a child would have more, low or no length gains compared to other children of the same age at the same point in time.…”

Looking beyond changes in averages in evaluating foundational learning: Some inequality measures

“…Similarly, Muralidharan et al (2019) describe how the entry of a large number of first-generation primary school students into the Indian educational system as a result of the increase in overall enrollment has also boosted within-school and within-class inequalities, with students from a more diverse background now going to school. These first-generation students are more likely to drop out of school, and perform worse in school ( Portela and Atherton, 2020 ), which ultimately increases within-class inequality. On top of this, there is work, such as that of Pritchett and Beatty (2015) , which describes the deep mismatch between fast-moving and wide-spanning curricula, and the baseline achievement of children.…”