The challenge of “who” in learning equity: The paradoxical need to both broaden and narrow sampling

• In Event: Learning Equity: Sampling Challenges of Who, What, Where and How?

Proposal

The United Nations SDGs have helped to focus international and national attention on improving the quality of education—and on learning. This has led to substantial increases in attention to, and international development assistance towards, the improvement of educational quality worldwide. Yet, the UN goals are mainly normative – they tend to emphasize averages across nations, with relatively limited attention to variations within countries and to the groups performing at the low end of the distribution. In spite of a growth of attention (and pronouncements) by the UN and donors and some national leaders in LMICs to focus on learning equity, direct investments into these poorest populations, and concomitant research has trailed behind. In other words, researchers, policymakers and practitioners still struggle to make a difference for the poor and most disadvantage learners.

In this presentation, the focus will be on the status of the research and policy dimensions of learning at the “bottom of the pyramid” (LBOP). In two edited volumes on this topic (Author et al., 2018; Author et al., 2022), international experts reviewed each of multiple dimensions about the variation in children’s learning outcomes that can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, language, and gender, as well as changes in globalization, migration, civil conflict and more. In addition, we know that learning is influenced by factors like access to schools (of differing quality), the presence of trained teachers (of differing quality), and more. In other words, we can detect variation in learning, and often identify one or more likely sources of variation, some of the time and in some places.

However, current research is still far too limited. In this presentation we argue that studies of disadvantaged children need a much more “broader” basis of sampling. This approach would challenge the assumption that a stratified sample would suffice to give an accurate rendering of the context of poor children’s lives. At the same time we argue for a more “narrow” basis of in-depth understanding of minorities within minorities. Examples of these approaches to research come from the authors research in Nepal, India and Morocco, where there are huge and problematic disparities among learners by gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language, school type, and location.

In sum, this paper will conclude with a number of specific learning equity research and policy recommendations that can narrow the gap in learning and raise the floor of the poorest. Improving learning is essential, but so too is learning how to overcome the multiple challenges hat have blocked change over many decades.

Authors

• Amrit Thapa, University of Pennsylvania

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania