Generating Rigorous, Action-Oriented Evidence in Post-Primary Education Around the World

• In Event: Roundtable session
  In Refereed Round-Table Session (English): Youth Issues in Secondary and University Education

Proposal

Governments and donors spend billions of dollars annually on education in low- and middle-income countries. However, the majority of spending is on programs which have not been rigorously evaluated. The available evidence suggests that there is large variation in the cost-effectiveness of education spending, with many large categories of spending poorly correlated with education outcomes. Understanding the relative effectiveness of different policies and programs for improving education is therefore a critical input for pivoting public and donor expenditure from less cost-effective to more cost-effective policies and programs, and thereby improving the effectiveness of the billions of dollars spent on education.

While there is a growing body of evidence on primary education, there are considerable gaps in our understanding of effective post-primary education (PPE) policies. These gaps are especially important to fill because a large fraction of the increase in education budgets in low- and middle-income countries in the coming years will be spent on post-primary education.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) launched the Post-Primary Education (PPE) Initiative in 2013 with the goal of generating rigorous evidence to inform policy decisions on how best to deliver accessible, equitable, high-quality, and relevant post-primary education to students in low- and middle-income countries. As part of the Initiative, J-PAL commissioned a review paper that identified 55 working and published papers evaluating the impact of PPE programs, of which 23 were randomized evaluations. In doing so, J-PAL identified key topics within post-primary education in which further research is needed. These include nine priority areas, ranging from education technology to student motivation, and two cross-cutting themes, including gender and marginalized populations.

Since its launch six years ago, the PPE Initiative has funded 70 projects to date, including 44 randomized evaluations and 26 pilot studies, leading to 16 working or published papers to date. As such, the PPE Initiative has doubled the number of randomized studies in post-primary education while broadening the existing literature base. Notably, the PPE Initiative has increased the number of randomized studies on teachers by 1.5 times and the number of randomized studies on pedagogy by seven times, while increasing the number of vocational/entrepreneurial education studies from 1 to 21 over the past six years.

The focus of this presentation will be J-PAL’s work on student motivation at the post-primary level, where 15 full and pilot PPE-funded randomized evaluations are completed or ongoing. The first part of this presentation will outline the knowledge gaps around the effectiveness of post-primary education programs and explain J-PAL’s funding approach to generating new evidence in this space. The second part of this presentation will share emerging policy lessons from student motivation programs, highlighting a gender attitudes program in India, a girls’ negotiation curriculum in Zambia, and an information returns program in Peru, all of which received PPE funding support over the past few years.

Author

• Priyanka Varma, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)