EnglishKenyaPAL Network
This contribution is published as part of the UNRISD Think Piece Series, Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization, launched to coincide with a major UNRISD Call for Paper Conference by the same name. In this series, experts from academia, advocacy and policy practice engage with the topic of inequality by critically exploring the various causes of deepening inequalities in the current context, their implications for sustainable development, and strategies and mechanisms being employed to reverse them as part of the global conversation on inequalities leading up to the review of Sustainable Development Goal 10 at the UN High-Level Political Forum in July 2019.
In rural and marginal urban areas of south-eastern Mexico, educational innovations are being developed by an alliance of civil and academic organizations called Medición Independiente de Aprendizajes (MIA). Its objective is to improve basic learning and reduce the educational inequality gaps by means of community participation. The results obtained suggest positive effects in reading and mathematics, and high motivation of volunteers, tutors and children themselves. This model allows community participation to generate significant changes in educational inequalities. The simplicity and systematicity of its processes allow its replication in various regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The global learning crisis is a problem that requires urgent attention.
There is a global crisis of learning in the world. According to UNESCO, 6 out of 10 children and adolescents, or about 617 million people, are unable to read a simple sentence or perform basic mathematical calculations. Of them, about a third are out of school (about 263 million people), but two thirds are not learning the minimum required to follow their educational path despite going to school, and these figures vary according to socioeconomic level, gender and ethnicity.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most unequal subcontinent in the world, this learning crisis shows the gaps in inequality between countries and within each country. According to the Latin American Laboratory for the Quality of Education (LLECE-UNESCO), with data from 2015, the Central American countries -with the exception of Costa Rica- show performances below the Latin American average in Reading, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Writing. Similarly, within each country the gaps are enormous. In Mexico, the National Institute for the Quality of Education shows that 5.5 million children and young people between 3 and 17 years of age do not attend school. And those who attend present a significant learning lag: more than 60% of students in sixth grade of primary school and third year of secondary school reached achievement level I, which is considered insufficient, in Mathematics. Regarding Language and Communication, 49.5% of sixth grade students in primary school and 29.4% of third grade students in secondary school reached an insufficient achievement level. And among them, those who go to rural schools and are indigenous systematically present lower results than those in schools in urban areas.
Faced with this crisis, a group of academicians and civil organizations has been developing since 2014 the project Medición Independiente de Aprendizajes (MIA), with the mission of improving education and basic learning through innovation, collaborative work and citizen participation. The project adapts in Mexico the methodology of “Citizen-Led Assessments” that began in 2004 in India with the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) project. This methodology was expanded to Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mali, Senegal and Nigeria, and today groups 13 countries of the global south under the PAL Network.
Since its creation, MIA has generated three actions with community participation as a fundamental component: 1) citizen assessments in six states of the Mexican Southeast-Caribbean region, characterized by high levels of marginalization and poverty; 2) implementation of four models of educational innovations aimed at improving the levels of reading and basic mathematics: summer courses, school clubs, school interventions and out-of-school interventions; and 3) evaluations of the results and systematization of the processes of these experiences to generate evidence that allows their continuous improvement and their replication in diverse contexts.
Citizen- led assessments carried out by volunteers in homes
Unlike traditional evaluations, MIA is applied to all children between the ages of 5 and 16, whether they go to school or not, thanks to the participation of volunteer citizens, who apply questionnaires that collect data on whether or not the children have the basic learning, necessary to continue an educational path. At MIA, we developed a very simple measurement instrument that is applied to the children one at a time, seeking to know if the individuals can read syllables, words, sentences, stories and if they can answer a simple question of inferential comprehension. In Mathematics, the instrument lets you know if the subject can identify two-digit numbers, solve additions, subtractions, divisions, and a simple problem that requires two operations. The complexity of the instrument is up to 2º of primary for Reading and up to 4º of primary for Mathematics. Civil organizations, which voluntarily decide to participate with MIA, are responsible for recruiting volunteers, who go through training on how to apply the instruments properly, and a representative sample of households is made, where the same instrument of very low difficulty is applied to all children. Between 2014 and 2018, measurements have been made, subject to rigorous quality standards agreed upon with the PAL network, in six states of south-eastern Mexico, where more than 2,800 volunteers have participated, visiting nearly 17,000 homes and interviewing around 20,000 children and teenagers in their homes. The results of MIA, on the one hand, complement the figures of the governmental evaluations, expanding the information on the basic levels of learning that measure these, providing focused and easy to understand data; and on the other hand, the results are articulated with public policy recommendations and educational innovations focused on counteracting the learning gap.
Educational innovations implemented by volunteers in communities and schools
The main result of the citizen evaluations confirmed the need to have focused interventions that improve the results of the children in the most basic learning. To this end, MIA designed and implemented various educational innovations: summer courses, school learning clubs and out-of-school interventions. The pedagogical model followed by these innovations is called (teaching at right level. This constructivist model recognizes and uses the previous knowledge of the student, emphasizes the accompaniment of facilitators, is based on the social nature of knowledge and organizes the participants according to their degree of knowledge, rather than their age. In general, the interventions include 20 sessions of 3 hours each. A number of playful and collective activities are carried out in them, different from the usual classroom sessions. The facilitators who implement these innovations belong to civil and voluntary organizations – sometimes in coordination with the municipalities – that want to do something for education in their communities. In 2016, we designed and evaluated 8 summer camps, 10 interventions within schools during school hours and 10 out-of-school interventions in rural and marginal urban areas of the state of Veracruz. By 2018 we had 55 active groups in 28 localities of 9 municipalities, with the participation of 4,100 children and 172 community facilitators.
Evaluation and systematization
Thanks to its academic nature, the third major activity of MIA has been to systematize and evaluate the processes and results of its actions. Thus, with regard to the citizen -led assessments carried out, process manuals and quality standards for quantitative data have been developed, and the results have been used to better understand the weight of various factors associated with the results.
Regarding educational innovations, a manual for each strategy was developed and their results were evaluated by comparing the results of basic learning in reading and math before and after the interventions, with positive results. In 2018, we evaluated 1,074 children who participated in the educational innovations, out of which 58% improved between 1 and 2 levels in Reading and 54% improved in Mathematics. Similarly, the systematization processes of the activities carried out, where we interviewed parents, volunteer facilitators, teachers and the students themselves, showed high levels of satisfaction and motivation with the results achieved and the simplicity of the methodology.
Challenges and scope of the project
The main challenge for MIA in the coming years is replicating this model in more communities. This implies, from our point of view, the ability to replicate this measurement methodology and interventions adapted to each specific context. We believe that systematizing and evaluating the processes and results is the first step that allows us to think about replicating these interventions in other rural and urban areas of the region, taking advantage of the widespread use of Spanish and the flexibility of the innovations to adapt the interventions to the specific contexts in which they are developed. We advocate citizen participation as an instrument towards raising awareness of the educational problem and towards the sustainability of the project, since it generates a “snowball” effect that manages to involve different community actors in a variety of ways.
Although the improvements achieved through the MIA project are focused on basic learning, we believe that they make a positive contribution to the great problem of the learning crisis that needs to be tackled from different fronts. Bearing this in mind, MIA includes actions that can be carried out inside and outside schools. The simplicity of the measurement and intervention instruments also facilitates the inclusion of the community in the programs, in addition to allowing thinking about changes within schools to incorporate these innovations to their improvement plans. We know that basic learning goes beyond Reading and Mathematics, which is why part of MIA’s research agenda is related to other basic learning for life that will be approached from the same collaborative perspective.
Felipe J. Hevia is a Doctor of Anthropology. Researcher at the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology CIESAS in Mexico. Coordinator of the Medición Independiente de Aprendizajes (MIA) (Independent Assessment of Learning) . E-mail: fhevia@ciesas.edu.mx
Samana Vergara-Lope is a Doctor of Psychology. Researcher at the Research Institute in Education of the University of Veracruz in Mexico. Coordinator of the Medición Independiente de Aprendizajes (MIA) (Independent Assessment of Learning) . E-mail: samanavergaralope@hotmail.com
Blog originally posted on the UNRISD website.