Combining Access and Quality Statistics for Low-Income Countries in Francophone Africa

• In Event: Educational inequalities, student outcomes and societal impact. Insights from international large-scale assessments in education

Proposal

Research and policy-making in education have historically focused on quantitative measures of education when assessing the state of education across countries. Recently, large-scale cross-national tests of cognitive skills have emerged as one way of moving beyond mere quantitative indicators of education (enrolment and attainment), and instead allow researchers to incorporate qualitative elements of education (learning outcomes). Notwithstanding the above, research and development initiatives too often assess these complementary aspects separately, which can lead to biased conclusions. To resolve this issue, the research presented here follows the method developed by Spaull and Taylor (2015) and provides composite measures of educational quantity (grade completion using Demographic Household Survey data) and quality (learning outcomes using PASEC data) for eight Francophone African countries. These composite measures are termed ‘access to literacy’ and ‘access to numeracy’ for literacy and numeracy rates respectively. Furthermore, this work also contributes to understanding the extent and nature of inequalities, by looking at gender and socioeconomic status groups separately when considering the composite measure of access and learning. This work is an update and improvement over our previous research (Lilenstein & Spaull, 2018) which looked at combining access rates and quality indicators in the same region but using an inferior dataset (PASEC datasets prior to 2014). The current paper uses the latest PASEC data (2014) which has been substantially improved over previous rounds. These results are therefore more reliable and believable. Results of this work point to an education crisis within the African countries included, where both non-enrolment and a lack of learning within schools are contributing to dismal educational outcomes at the Grade 6 level.

Authors

• Adaiah Keren Lilenstein, Stellenbosch University

• Nic Spaull, Stellenbosch University