The Pedagogy of Science and Environment: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Beuermann, Diether; Näslund-Hadley, Emma; Ruprah, Inder J.; Thompson, Jennelle

doi:10.1080/00220388.2012.754432

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Initiatives aimed at influencing parental practices have been more effective in improving the developmental and academic skills of children during their first few years of life. 73 Similarly, Beuermann, Naslund-Hadley, Ruprah, & Thompson (2013) assessed a program that aimed to teach science in third grade in Lima, Peru in 2010 in which the teacher posed a problem, provided the materials to solve it, and students had to conduct their own experiments and report their results. The program improved test scores on the physical world assessment by .18 SDs, but not scores on assessments of understanding of the human body and the environment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Impact Evaluations

Ganimian¹,

Murnane²

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reviews and interprets the evidence from 223 rigorous impact evaluations of educational initiatives conducted in 56 low-and middle-income countries. We consider for inclusion in our review all studies in recent syntheses, which have reached seemingly conflicting conclusions about which interventions improve educational outcomes. We group interventions based on their theory of action. We derive four lessons from the studies we review. First, reducing the costs of going to school and expanding schooling options increase attendance and attainment, but do not consistently increase student achievement. Second, providing information about school quality, developmentally appropriate parenting practices, and the economic returns to schooling affects the actions of parents and the achievement of children and adolescents. Third, more or better resources improve student achievement only if they result in changes in children's daily experiences at school. Finally, well-designed incentives increase teacher effort and student achievement from very low levels, but low-skilled teachers need specific guidance to reach minimally acceptable levels of instruction. Interventions.We include studies of educational interventions, such as offering computer-assisted learning or altering incentives for teachers. We also include studies of health interventions, such as providing deworming drugs and iron supplements, that include at least one of the educational outcomes mentioned above. Methods.We only include studies that take advantage of exogenous variation in the receipt of the intervention, either by randomly assigning individuals to a treatment or by exploiting quasi-random variation in treatment assignment from natural experiments. Included studies based on natural experiments use differences-in-differences, regression discontinuities, and/or instrumental variables to estimate the causal impacts of interventions. We do not consider studies that attempt to estimate counterfactual outcomes either by employing matching methods or fixed effects for individuals in pre-post comparisons. Literature SearchWe searched for studies in English in peer-reviewed journals, working paper series, and academic conferences. We conducted the final search that we describe below from January to September 2015. Figure 1 offers an overview of the search and review process. 3 Citation tracking. We consulted eight reviews of impact evaluations of educational interventions in developing countries and tracked the citations. These included meta-analyses, narrative, and vote-counting reviews. 4 This search produced 253 studies, of which 119 met our inclusion criteria.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Impact Evaluations

Ganimian¹,

Murnane²

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The default government training in the control group represents the public status quo, making the comparison with treatment highly relevant for policy. 8 The outreach component builds on studies of other training programs with similar follow-up for trained teachers (e.g., Beuermann et al 2013;Abeberese, Kumler, and Linden 2014;Piper and Zuilkowski 2015). The exchange visits resemble a form of teacher coaching (e.g., Bruns, Costa, and Cunha 2018;Albornoz et al 2018;Cilliers et al 2019), except that trained teachers received feedback from peers rather than professional coaches.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entrepreneurship education and teacher training in Rwanda

Blimpo

Pugatch

2019

Journal of Development Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We assess, via an experiment across 207 secondary schools, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country's required upper secondary entrepreneurship course. In addition to the government's standard training, a random sample of schools received intensive training organized by an NGO for two years. The training consisted of (i) six training sessions during school breaks, ii) exchange visits each term where teachers provided feedback to their peers, and (iii) outreach and support from NGO staff at least twice per year. The program increased teachers' use of active instruction, consistent with the reform's features. These effects on pedagogy did not translate into improvements in student academic outcomes or skills. Treated students increased their participation in businesses by 5 percentage points, or 17% of the control mean, with a commensurate decrease in wage employment, and no effect on overall income. These results suggest substitution between entrepreneurship and employment among students in treated schools.

show abstract

“…Consistent with the idea of many students falling behind the national curriculum, a randomized evaluation concluded that the 2010 pilot program only improved the achievement of third-grade students who already had above-average baseline performances (Beuermann, et al 2013). 1 Remedial education, by which students receive targeted, self-paced teaching, shows promise at improving short-and medium-term academic performance of low-achieving students in a variety of contexts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Targeted Remedial Education: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Saavedra

Näslund-Hadley

Alfonso

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An outstanding challenge in education is improving learning among low-achieving students. We present results from the first randomized experiment of an inquiry-based remedial scienceeducation program for low-performing elementary students in the setting of a developing country. At 48 low-income public elementary schools in Lima, Peru and surrounding areas, third-grade students scoring in the bottom half of their science classes were selected at random to receive up to 16 remedial sessions of 90 minutes each during the school year. Control-group compliance with assignment (no extra tutoring) was close to perfect. Treatment-group compliance was roughly 40 percent, or five to six remedial sessions-a 4 to 5 percent increase in total science instruction time over the school year. Despite the low-intensity treatment, students assigned to the remedial sessions scored 0.12 standard deviations higher on a science endline test. But all improvements were concentrated among boys, for whom gains were 0.22 standard deviations. Remedial education does not produce within-student spillovers to math, or spillovers on other students.

show abstract

The Pedagogy of Science and Environment: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Cited by 11 publications

References 11 publications

Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Impact Evaluations

Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Impact Evaluations

Entrepreneurship education and teacher training in Rwanda

Targeted Remedial Education: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About