Assessing numeracy levels of marginalized out-of-school girls in Ghana: Trends at Baseline

• In Event: Mathematics teaching and learning in world education programs in Ghana, Nepal, and Cote d’Ivoire: taking stock of where we are and sharing lessons learned

Proposal

The Strategic Approaches to Girls’ Education (STAGE) project lowers the barriers that vulnerable and marginalized girls face in achieving an education by providing formal and nonformal education tracks to 20,100 girl between 10 and 19 years old in six regions of Ghana. Both tracks include a major focus on learning outcomes in numeracy, literacy, and life skills, as a precursor to their transition to formal school or a relevant and appropriate livelihoods pathways.

The Accelerated Learning Programs (ALPs) for the girls aged 10-19 who were not in school previously or dropped out of school, will span six to eight months. They are taught basic literacy, numeracy and life skills using accelerated literacy strategies contextualized to their community. The STAGE numeracy approach builds on the Comprehensive Basic Education (CBE) approach and aims to give confidence to girls to manage the mathematical demands of real-life situations. The 6-month ALPs will balance instruction in numeracy with literacy and life skills in a program designed to be culturally appropriate and inclusive.

STAGE will assess numeracy of the girls enrolled in the program, and compare these with comparison groups (who are in school for the formal track, and out of school for the nonformal track), to enable measurement of progress. An adapted version of the Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA) at baseline will inform the interventions, and enable tracking of learning for both the treatment and comparison groups. Assessments of mathematics ability will include measures of number identification, number manipulation, addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, and finally, a few word problems to ensure that students are able to apply operations. The range of problems allow the assessments to track progression from Numbers, to Addition/Subtraction and Multiplication/Division and beyond. STAGE will also use country-specific curriculum benchmarks to accommodate mastery and prevent ceiling effects by including additional sub-tasks for measurement and space data, algebra, and a larger number of word problems employing more sophisticated mathematical operations. A number of mathematics assessments (at least three) will be prepared and piloted, all of which are calibrated at the same level of difficulty for use at baseline, midline, and endline stages in order to track learning progress over time. Items will be changed in each test to ensure that we can disentangle ability from recall. Each version will seek to accommodate language and disability variations.

STAGE expects to have baseline data analysed by March 2019, providing useful details about the levels of numeracy of the girls at baseline, disaggregated, by region, age group, and identified criteria such as disability and other forms of marginalization. Numeracy scores will also be correlated with literacy scores to identify initial trends. Findings will feed into adapting the interventions, and enable tracking progress of the girls through the program (4 years for the formal track, and 1 year for the nonformal track), which when compared with girls in the comparison groups helps assess the effectiveness of the interventions, and inform numeracy and mathematics education in Ghana and in similar contexts.

Authors

• Miguel Doran, World Education Inc.

• Amogh Basavaraj, World Education, Inc.