Building a Research Project at Scale with Government Ownership: The Strengthening Teacher Accountability to Reach All Students (STARS) Project

• In Event: Evidence to policy in education: leveraging rigorous research for improved education quality

Proposal

In Ghana, one of the key priorities of the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) is improving learning outcomes. Based on insights from studies in India and Kenya showing that significant learning improvements can be achieved by targeting the level of instruction to pupils’ achievement levels, researchers and an international research and policy nonprofit collaborated with (GES) to develop and evaluate the Teacher Community Assistant Initiative (TCAI). The results from TCAI reaffirmed these findings and laid the groundwork for the Strengthening Teacher Accountability to Reach All Students (STARS) project, which is helping to inform Ghana’s Ministry of Education on how teacher-led targeted instruction can be replicated at scale in Ghana.

Unlike researcher-driven or donor-driven projects, the guiding framework for this study was that all stakeholders had ownership over the project. Researchers partnered with several agencies within the Ministry of Education and GES to design the curriculum, train teachers, and monitor the program via a wide, participatory process. Researchers also convene a quarterly steering committee with these partners to discuss project progress and any issues or decision points that need to be collectively decided upon. This continuous engagement is especially important given how often staff members change roles in GES and other stakeholder organizations, so that the organizations maintain their membership and interest in the steering committee. In addition, conducting research at scale within the public education system requires deep, meaningful collaboration. Government agencies involved in project implementation not only feel ownership over the program, but also feel responsible for its implementation and success.

During this presentation, an international research and policy nonprofit will discuss how it built this theory- and practice-driven research project and maintain it at scale, including 1) how it was able to engage and get buy-in from policymakers to create the STARS project; and 2) how it continues to help maintain government ownership throughout the project.

Author

• Bridget Konadu Gyamfi, Innovations for Poverty Action