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Session Submission Summary

Efficacy of household-based learning assessments in improving education for a more equitable world: lessons from East Africa

Tue, February 21, 6:30 to 8:00pm EST (6:30 to 8:00pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Independence Level (5B), Independence F

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Systems of education across East Africa just like across the globe have all along been designed centrally and implemented with a degree of decentralisation to address local concerns (Mayer 2021, Kamens & Benavot 2011; Tatto 2021). The educational outcomes have sought to address the challenge of equity, access, and most recently learning. According to Mayer & Oancea (2021), since the turn of the century when the world made a conscious decision to embrace the Education for All (EFA) targets in 2000 that ended in 2015, there has been effort to address EFA Goal 6 through implementation of programs to address quality of education across the groups of the learning population. The Commitment to Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) adopted in 2015 places quality at the heart of education systems in realising equitable education (Singal, Sabates, Aslam & Saeed 2020). In East Africa, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are signatories to the EFA Goals and the subsequent SDG 4. Within this context, household-based learning assessments were first conducted in East Africa in 2010 under the auspices of an East African civil society organisation. Working with citizen volunteers, children aged (4)-16 years were assessed in basic literacy and numeracy using assessments based on Grade two curriculums. Between 2010 and 2021, more than 15 household learning assessments were conducted by the organisation and reached over 500,000 households, assessed over 700,000 children in basic reading and numeracy. Recently, the assessment of life skills and values is an effort to expand the utility of the household-based assessments. Yet, new areas are emerging that provide indicators for measuring equity in education. There is increasing clarity on the facets of equity to include power disparity, income, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, ability, culture, religion, geo-politics, and neocolonialism, among others. It is important to note the context within which these factors exist. According to Harmey and Moss (2021), the outbreak of COVID-19 has been termed to have affected different groups of the society differently and may exacerbate the inequalities in education that has become systemic.

Both assessments of basic literacy and numeracy and assessments of life skills and values implemented in East Africa have similar processes that include; test development; developing assessment frameworks, selection of competencies to be assessed, selection of households to be assessed, pre-testing and piloting, use of citizen volunteers to assess the learners/children and a public engagement strategy to improve and strengthen the school systems that are accepted to be cost effective pathway to inclusive learning and education. The assessments are also developed and implemented with some degree of adaptation to respond to the specific country contexts beginning with the curriculum and learning demands for each country.

This panel seeks to share the experiences of designing and implementing agile tools for measuring equity in education using the household-based assessments. The panel makes an effort to demonstrate how the assessments of basic literacy and numeracy and life skills and values have helped to reveal the learning gaps among different groups that would be often left out when school-based assessments are used. The panel will share on the challenges and opportunities of harmonising assessments in approaches and tools and how such can be overcome to realise rigorous tools for measuring important facets of equity. The panel is composed of three papers; a framing paper, a paper on adaptation and harmonisation experiences and a paper on challenges and opportunities. The first paper will present a framework of using household-based assessments, the process, test development processes, sampling of learners/children to be assessed, preparation of citizen volunteers for assessment, assessment protocols, data analysis and engagement process after data analysis. The second paper will focus on adaptation and harmonisation of the process of using household-based assessment bringing to fore the realities and rationale for the above. The third and final paper will focus on the challenges and opportunities of using household-based learning assessments to measure equity to improve education for a more equitable world.

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