Strengthening and Leveraging Administrative Data to support evidence-based decision-making in education

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

Proposal

Many critical education policy questions can be answered with improved data and evidence: from helping teachers know how to best use their classroom time, to helping policymakers understand whether their resources are reaching far-flung places. Meanwhile, much of the data that governments already collect could be used to answer these critical questions, often with small investments of time and resources. These investments may be in improving the reliability of existing data, digitization of key data points, linkages to other key datasets, or simply in improving the usability of data dashboards.

In this presentation, an international research and policy nonprofit will present a model for working from an embedded standpoint within government units, finding opportunities to leverage existing data and build a culture of using evidence from within the Departments and Ministries of Education themselves.

The presentation will cover the five stages of data usage maturity, steps on a pathway to becoming a learning organization, that government agencies typically fall within: 1) unreliable data across the board; 2) basic data to be leveraged; 3) isolated good data use; 4) sound M&E system; 5) learning organization. In some contexts, the Ministry of Education already has a monitoring and evaluation function that routinely collected administrative data which they collated and leveraged for regular reporting. However, few developing country ministries are at that stage already; even those who have already worked extensively on research projects have not necessarily developed the tools to use data and evidence themselves. This presentation will cover how to adapt data and evidence strategies to the contextual realities—recognizing it will take time to get to a stage where experimenting and learning become part of business as usual.

The presentation will further discuss how to approach the following four active components of encouraging governments to leverage administrative data for improved education policymaking: 1) Strengthening administrative data collection, organization, and accessibility; 2) Enhancing data use for operational management; 3) Encouraging data use for organizational learning; 4) Producing generalizable research. The presenter will draw on examples of this work from Peru, Zambia, and elsewhere, and introduce practical tools for data mapping, capacity-building on data use, and other related activities. Drawing heavily on the Peru case, the presentation will provide examples of how rigorous evaluations of education interventions using administrative data have produced research findings that have led to the scale-up of proven education programs.

Author

• Bethany Park, Innovations for Poverty Action