Passerelles remediation program in Senegal

• In Event: Equity and Inclusion in Education: What Role for Remediation?

Proposal

While remedial programs continue to play a key role in the educational response to children in crisis-affected and fragile contexts, evidence remains limited on the effectiveness of these interventions. This presentation will shed light on whether additional targeted support can affect students’ abilities to succeed in their regular education programming, and to what extent.

The USAID/Senegal Passerelles project is a 5-year project (2018-2023) working to improve access to a quality relevant education that develops essential life skills for boys and girls ages 9-16 in Southern Senegal, particularly in Casamance (Ziguinchor, Sedhiou, and Kolda) and Kedougou. Access to education remains a major challenge in Senegal, with low enrollment rates and significant levels of dropout. Children who do not do well academically may try and repeat grades multiple times without necessarily obtaining the appropriate amount of learning and then be taken out of school by their parents because classmates have already advanced to middle school or high school.

To improve the transition between primary and middle school, Passerelles provides a remedial education program to learners in the last grades of formal primary schools. This program is implemented by facilitators recruited from local communities who meet with learners for weekly sessions to reinforce foundational concepts in reading (French) and math and support them on developing learning strategies. Boys and girls who participate in the remediation program are selected by their schools’ directors based on their low performance in teacher-administered reading and math assessments.

This session will present results from a study examining the reading and math skills of a cohort of 2040 learners from 40 formal schools in Kedougou, Kolda, Sedhiou, and Ziguinchor. We worked with school directors to identify students whose academic performance would be at a similar or slightly higher level than learners who participated in remediation. We examine learners’ performance across reading and math tasks done both before and after their participation. To isolate the causal effect of the remediation program on their academic performance, the study will explore a regression discontinuity design (RDD) with two selection variables. We find that students who participated in the Passerelles remediation program had scores that were 0.35 SD higher in reading and math when compared to peers with similar levels of academic performance, but who did not participate in the remediation sessions.

Authors

• Nathalie Louge, FHI 360

• Rafael Eduardo Contreras Gomez, FHI 360