Education for a Changing World: A Study of Cognitive Flexibility in Rwandan Primary Schools

• In Event: Early childhood/primary ed

Proposal

In recent years, governments worldwide have faced a growing realisation that ‘traditional’ forms of education are inadequate to meet the needs of modern society. Increased investments to widen access and even raise school attainment have failed to translate into expected economic growth (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2008; Pritchett, 2001). Basic literacy and numeracy continue to provide essential foundations for later educational experiences and lifelong learning, but alone they appear insufficient to drive long-term financial prosperity, foster inclusive social change and meet all of the Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, in many contexts, they represent the post-colonial legacy of education systems designed to benefit only a small proportion of the population (Tikly & Bond, 2013).

There has been growing interest in categorising and developing learners’ so-called ‘21st century’ skills for life in the modern world (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). These typically include transferable competencies such as collaboration, creativity and problem solving, which many governments are promoting to help learners use and apply skills and knowledge in their everyday lives (Amadio, 2013). Creativity and problem solving could offer particular advantages for more sustainable living, enabling individuals, communities and businesses to better balance the competing demands of economic, social and environmental imperatives (Elkington, 1998). Learners might thereby not just solve the problems of today but also avoid creating the problems of tomorrow.

However, questions remain about how such skills can best be fostered, and especially in low-resource contexts. Many countries have introduced competence-based curricula into schools to build and diversify their workforce capacities (Tedesco, Opertti & Amadio, 2014). Such curricula often complement traditional, theoretical learning with more practical competencies on issues such as peace education, financial awareness and environmental sustainability (Rwanda Education Board, 2015). Evidence concerning the efficacy of such approaches is nevertheless limited. Studies of their implementation across sub-Saharan Africa highlight the need for careful coordination across different parts of the education system, not least training, assessment and material design, to ensure that teachers receive adequate support and avoid becoming overwhelmed by the additional academic expectations (Gauthier, 2013; Musonda, 1999).

The key for developing effective 21st century and transferable skills may rather lie in children’s earlier educational experiences. Abadzi (2016), for example, emphasises the importance of learners mastering and automatising basic cognitive processes before they can tackle more complex activities. Children’s early executive functions, their ability to control their own behaviour and work towards prescribed goals, are also essential for developing higher-order skills like planning and problem solving (Diamond, 2014).

Cognitive flexibility, one component of children’s executive functions, could offer particular benefits for learners’ development in a rapidly changing world. Diamond (2014) describes it as “creatively ‘thinking outside the box’, seeing anything from different perspectives, and quickly and flexibly adapting to changed circumstances” (p. 206). Such flexibility arguably lies at the heart of skill transferability and the growing need for people to acquire competencies in one context and apply them in another. Cognitive flexibility may also foster resilience, the ability to adapt to adverse conditions, whether political or environmental, and support children to understand and engage with multiple perspectives which could include other people, different species or indeed the wider natural world (Ungar, 2015).

Until recently, there had been little research into the development of cognitive flexibility and even other executive functions among children in low-income countries (Dias & Seabra, 2015). However, the situation is now shifting with growing data from diverse contexts across Asia, Africa and Latin America (Hermida et al., 2015; Holding et al., 2018; Obradović et al., 2016). This paper therefore builds on the emerging trend and presents the findings of an empirical study of primary-school pupils’ cognitive flexibility in Rwanda.

Since 2016, Rwandan schools have been working to implement a new competence-based curriculum to foster their learners’ more holistic educational outcomes (Ngendahayo & Askell-Williams, 2016). Primary schools in particular provide many children with their only formal education experiences given current rates of enrolment and drop-out (Abbott et al., 2015; MINEDUC, 2016). The study therefore sought to answer the following research questions:
• How does Rwandan pupils’ cognitive flexibility appear to change over the course of their public primary education?
• How does the cognitive flexibility development of Rwandan public primary-school pupils interact with their other cognitive competencies?

To address these questions, the study drew on the bioecological systems theory formulated by Bronfenbrenner (1979) and selected four public primary schools as microsystems within which children develop. In each case, the school was located in close proximity to unplanned urban settlements and served many learners from low-income households.

The fieldwork was conducted during 2018 and sampled a cross-section of 306 pupils from Primary 1 and 4 classes. Specifically, the research was undertaken early in the 2018 academic year to capture quantitative data on the children’s competencies right at the start of their formal schooling career, and after completing three years of lower primary education. Each pupil was assessed one-to-one in their mother tongue by a trained Rwandan enumerator. Established psychological measures such as the Dimension Change Card Sort (Zelazo, 2006), Flexible Item Selection Task (Jacques & Zelazo, 2001; Dick, 2014) and Object-based Pattern Reasoning Assessment (Zuilkowski et al., 2016) were used to explore children’s cognitive flexibility and nonverbal reasoning. Pupils’ basic literacy skills were also tested using subtasks from the Early Grade Reading Assessment (RTI International, 2011) and the Oral Reading Fluency Assessment of Rwandan Schools (Education Development Center, 2017). Finally, children were briefly surveyed to ascertain information concerning their pre-primary schooling experiences and various relevant household factors.

This paper will describe the key findings of the research, in particular the relationship between children’s cognitive flexibility and their development of other learning outcomes. Initially, ANOVA and independent t-tests will be used to identify child and household characteristics revealed in the surveys as relating most strongly to cognitive flexibility. Linear multiple regression and Pearson’s Rho will then be used to examine associations and interactions between pupils’ public primary schooling and their literacy, nonverbal reasoning and cognitive flexibility development.

Author

• Stephen Hamilton Bayley, University of Cambridge