Teaching at the Right Level in Mexico: Effects of literacy and numeracy courses on educational achievement and inequities during COVID-19

• In Event: Teaching at the Right Level in Mexico and Central America: Meeting Students Where They Are

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the most significant disruption of education systems in recent history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion students in more than 190 countries and every continent. School closures and other learning spaces have affected 94% of the global student population, up to 99% in low- and lower-middle-income countries (United Nations, 2020, p. 2). Moreover, the effects of this pandemic in education disproportionately affect the most excluded and poorest (Fore, 2021) and girls and women (GPE, 2020). As Unesco states, "The COVID-19 crisis has shown us the need to focus on equity and inclusion in learning. In the current circumstances, the most complex educational challenge is to ensure that equity in access and learning is not reversed" (IES-UNESCO, 2020, p. 1).
In Mexico, the discussion has focused on increasing structural inequalities already present in the national education system. As a result, many scholars estimated that "learning poverty" increased (Iqbal et al., 2020). This result suggests the need to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of quality of learning, educational inequalities, and the urgency of developing evidence-based strategies to address it.

The objective of the study is to analyze the effectiveness of remedial courses using the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) methodology in 1) fundamental learning in reading and mathematics and 2) addressing the educational inequalities that the Covid pandemic has caused in the Mexican educational system.
Methodology: a total of 360 subjects with an average age of 9.49 years from a purposive sample in Veracruz, Mexico, participated.
Face-to-face and distance interventions were applied, and pre-post measurements were taken to evaluate the intervention.
Results: Positive and significant learning gains were identified in the participants who received the courses: 0.54 SD in reading and 0.34 SD in mathematics. In addition, the TaRL remedial courses helped to reduce gender, socioeconomic, locality, and disability gaps. With these data, it can be concluded that the interventions contribute to the fight against lags and learning losses; however, their effect in reducing inequalities is not conclusive. Therefore, it is necessary to continue implementing evidence-based courses that help understand the effects on learning and inequality to reduce the loss of learning (resulting from school closures) and reduce educational gaps.

The need to implement evidence-based courses to strengthen essential learning to accelerate learning and reduce educational inequalities, which increased significantly with the pandemic, is also discussed. Finally, a future research agenda is proposed.

Author

• Samana Vergara Lope Tristán, Universidad Veracruzana