Defining and measuring context-specific socio-emotional learning skills: Experiences from Afghanistan

• In Event: Unpacking holistic learning – defining and measuring socio-emotional learning

Proposal

Afghanistan is one of the 10 countries participating in Aga Khan Foundation’s Schools2030 programme. Marred by three decades of sustained conflict, the country has faced an array of challenges to its education system, with increasing precarity for vulnerable groups, including girls, older girls, those living in the poorest and remote areas over the last year (UNICEF, 2022). A recent report (Save the Children and UNICEF, 2022) has found that 1.1 million secondary school girls have been banned from school, and while 70% of primary school boys and girls have returned to school, there is a higher percentage of boys going back than girls. Behind these numbers, there are further challenges to quality of education, including supporting quality holistic learning underpinned by useful, practical, valid and reliable assessment data.

In this context, Schools2030 Afghanistan works in seven districts within three provinces, Baghlan, Badakhshan and Bamyan. 34 schools benefit from this project as we work directly with 500 teachers, administrators and education leaders over ten years, impacting learning outcomes for 5,000 students across the three cohorts: Pre-school (age 5), Grade 4 (age 10) and Grade 7 (age 15). Following a stakeholder consultation process in the first half of 2021, we have chosen to focus on Science, Creativity and Relationship Building domains for the Grade 4 cohort, and Science, Ethical Decision-making and Relationship Building domains for the Grade 7 cohort, along with the literacy and numeracy domains for all age groups.

We developed a set of context-specific, valid and reliable assessment tools for the non-academic domains to be used by teachers to measure changes in learners’ outcomes as teachers implement their innovations in line with the Schools2030 process. We followed a consultative approach, whereby teachers provided qualitative feedback and we also conducted a qualitative pilot of the tools in the first half of 2022.

In our presentation, we will share our assessment journey, from tool development, piloting and tool implementation, discuss results from the student assessments and implications for the assessment work in the Schools2030 programme in our country and context. We will then outline how the tools developed through this consultative process performed, based on the psychometric report undertaken by the Global Assessment Partner (Oxford MeasurEd). We will outline which SEL domains were particularly hard to develop quantitative measures for, which were more conducive to measurement and what kinds of challenges were faced.

The first country to implement assessments under the Schools2030 programme, our experience will offer important insights for measuring and making sense of the holistic learning outcomes in ways that support and empower teachers. Our presentation will offer methodological insight into tool development and administration, as well as contribute to the understanding of learning outcomes in an important context such as Afghanistan, with lessons learned for other fragile and crisis-affected settings.

Author

• Ahmad Rashed Hayati, Aga Khan Foundation