International Education

�� initiative reveals racial, gender, other disparities in Brazilian schools

Carrie Spector — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:36:40 +0000

�� initiative reveals racial, gender, other disparities in Brazilian schools

Carrie Spector Tue, 10/29/2024 - 10:36

�� researchers are adapting digital reading and math assessments for use in Brazil, to provide teachers with more timely feedback on learning differences. The research is part of an initiative to identify inequities in Brazilian K-12 schools. (Photo: Diego Lima)

Data Science | Education Policy | International Education

A team led by �� education professor Guilherme Lichand surveys students and educators in Brazil, identifying inequities in the school system.

October 31, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Earlier this year, when the Brazilian government reported its official data on the number of K-12 students nationwide with disabilities or learning disorders, �� education scholar Guilherme Lichand thought the figure seemed off.

According to data from Brazil’s annual school census, less than 4 percent of K-12 students have some type of physical or learning disability. But Lichand expected the actual number would be much higher, given U.S. rates and the international average.

Lichand, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) who is originally from Brazil, runs an initiative called Equidade.info (Portuguese for equity), which collects data on K-12 schools in Brazil through interviews with students, teachers, and administrators across the country.

Spurred by the dubious census figures, the team recently investigated the prevalence of physical and learning disabilities in the country's K-12 schools – arriving at a rate of at least 12.8 percent, more than three times the official statistic.

“There are differences in socioeconomic backgrounds that make it less likely for some kids to get a medical diagnosis,” said Lichand, who also co-directs the �� Lemann Center, a center housed at the GSE that supports Brazilian scholars at �� and initiatives to improve the Brazilian educational system. “But the government data is what determines how school resources are allocated. If you’re a policymaker making decisions based on incomplete data, kids are not necessarily going to get the support they need.”

Equidade.info, a project of the �� Lemann Center, analyzes data from a representative sample of schools throughout Brazil on a variety of issues, from chronic absenteeism and reading proficiency to racial relations and students’ sense of belonging.

GSE Assistant Professor Guilherme Lichand

Some of the initiative’s findings so far:

About a quarter of K-12 students report being a victim of bullying during the previous 12 months. Females report higher rates than their male peers, and non-white students report higher rates than white respondents.
Students’ sense of feeling welcome at school decreases as they progress from elementary to high school, with Black students reporting lower rates overall than their white classmates.
The prevalence of child labor among the student population is eight times what official statistics indicate.
Internet speed in schools is much lower than official data indicates, with a significant disparity between public and private schools.
More than half of teachers report witnessing cases of racial discrimination in schools – data cited in a recent push by Brazilian legislators urging the Ministry of Education to address racism in the country’s educational system.

In the country’s annual school census, information on many key markers of inequality is absent or incomplete, said Lichand, who is also a faculty affiliate of the �� Center on Early Childhood and the �� King Center on Global Development, and a fellow at �� Impact Labs and the �� Institute for Advancing Just Societies.

“Without precise information about differences along dimensions like race, gender, and disability status, education policies often magnify inequalities instead of alleviating them,” he said. “We need better data to design more equitable policies. So we established a different system for collecting it.”

Marta Vitória, an enumerator for the state of Sergipe, conducts a survey with a student for Equidade.info.

What the school census doesn’t capture

In Brazil, most of the Ministry of Education’s information on the state of K-12 schools comes from the annual school census, which solicits information on all 49 million students at 160,000 schools nationwide. Census responses are supplied by school staff, ideally but not necessarily drawn from information provided by students and their families.

“The only way you can get that much student-level data is to sacrifice quality in the way that you collect the data,” said Lichand. “One can only hope that what the schools are providing about these 49 million students is accurate.”

Given the lack of oversight for the process, Lichand questions the reliability of the data, especially where factors like race and disability status are concerned. These are complicated constructs by any measure, he said, particularly if the designation isn’t self-reported but determined by a school official or other figure.

With race, for example, Lichand said Equidade.info has found a discrepancy for 30 percent of students between what they report their race to be and what the school reports. Schools also have the option of not reporting students’ race in the first place, an option that’s prevalent in the data, Lichand noted.

“Until 2014, there was no information on race for half of the students in the country,” he said. “More recently, the government has made efforts to have schools provide this information, but still at least a quarter of students are missing race data.”

Lichand’s data collection model for Equidade.info goes deeper than the school census with in-person surveys of a representative sample of more than 200 schools from all of Brazil’s 27 states. The sample reflects key characteristics of the school population nationwide – urban and rural schools, public and private, technical and academic – serving students of all backgrounds, including indigenous populations. The researchers use statistical methods to ensure the results mirror the universe of K-12 students, teachers, and schools.

College undergraduates in each state are recruited and trained to serve as enumerators, visiting local K-12 schools every two months to conduct tablet-based surveys or run tests.

“Our enumerators can collect data that the school census doesn’t capture,” Lichand said. “They can ask students to self-identify their race. They can have students do tasks that indicate certain abilities, like reading fluency and comprehension. They can measure the school’s internet speed objectively, by connecting to the wifi network and running a speed test app.”

Because the enumerators visit the schools every two months, the surveys can include questions related to issues of the moment, like a mass school shooting or the wildfires currently raging in Brazil. “We can ask principals how many days of school they’ve lost to climate events, what kind of adaptation measures they have in place,” said Lichand. “We can be really responsive to what’s going on, and generate timely data that’s useful for policy and the public debate.”

The initiative’s website provides dashboards to visualize key insights from the data, particularly around gender, racial, and regional disparities, and all of the information is shared with the Ministry of Education.

Timely feedback on learning differences

Lichand is also working with other GSE researchers to adapt new U.S. digital reading and math assessments for use in Brazil, not only to support research but also to provide teachers with timely, personalized feedback on learning differences so they can more quickly support students who fall behind.

A Nov. 8 conference at the GSE will explore the potential of using the two ��-developed technologies in Brazil: the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), led by Associate Professor Jason Yeatman, and the �� Mental Arithmetic Response Time Evaluation (SMARTE), led by Professor Bruce McCandliss.

Lichand, an educational economist and entrepreneur, hopes to replicate the model he created for Brazil with Equidade.info for other low- and middle-income countries in the Global South, especially in Latin America and Africa.

“We know that high-quality data is in demand,” said Lichand, who is frequently featured in Brazilian media discussing Equidade.info’s findings. “As researchers, the nature of our work is to put knowledge out there and hope that it makes its way to change policy. Now we are starting to work closely with officials to be sure we can meet their specific data needs, creating pathways to support equitable policies.”

Júllia Kessia (in forefront), an enumerator for the state of Alagoas, poses for a photo with a group of young students she surveyed for Equidade.info.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Guilherme Lichand

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:27:20 +0000

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector Fri, 09/27/2024 - 13:27

A child in Bangladesh is given tasks to assess executive function skills, which strongly predict the ability to thrive in school and beyond. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Child Development | Early Childhood | International Education

A global network led by �� education professor Jelena Obradović works to help promote executive function skills in children around the world.

September 30, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Certain skills are essential for many demands of everyday life, helping us to focus, control impulses, manipulate information in our minds, and shift from one task to another. These skills, known as executive functions (EFs), begin developing in early childhood and are linked to behaviors that serve well into adulthood, from learning to relationship-building.

These skills are considered universal across cultures. But what about the way they’re measured?

Tests used to track children’s development of these skills are often based on assumptions that don’t match cultural norms, producing inaccurate information and making it harder to support kids properly, researchers say. Young people around the world may be identified as having poor EF skills just because they were not familiar with certain parts of the testing protocol.

GSE Professor Jelena Obradović spoke about the importance of EFs at a conference at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Sept. 26. (Photo: Arthur de Tassigny)

“EFs strongly predict how kids thrive in school, and there are many ways to intervene and help them improve these skills,” said Jelena Obradović, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning. “But to understand where help is needed, we need to know that we’re measuring the right thing. We need assessments that align with their cultural context and everyday experiences.”

Obradović, a developmental psychologist and director of the �� Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK), recently set out to fill that need. A longtime researcher studying EFs in children around the world, she reached out to fellow experts in the field and established the Global Executive Function Initiative (GEFI) at ��, a network of scholars working to promote EF development and assessment across cultures.

On Sept. 26, at an international conference on brain sciences, early childhood care, and education held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Obradović presented on a panel about the importance of EFs and introduced new guidelines developed by GEFI for adapting assessments to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe.

“These are foundational skills that support any kind of goal-directed behaviors, and they’re going to be important for lifelong learning,” said Obradović. “If we can measure them well, we can promote and improve them.”

Skills for lifelong learning

Executive functioning generally involves three core skills: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Inhibitory control includes not only resisting an impulse or habit, but also being able to suppress distractions and focus on a task. Working memory refers to the ability to keep information in mind and use it in various circumstances, such as following instructions. Cognitive flexibility involves the ability to shift attention between various tasks or demands, especially in response to feedback or changes in the environment.

To assess a child’s EF skills, there are two basic approaches: observing children’s actions in everyday settings, where teachers and parents report on behaviors linked to the skills; and direct testing, where children are given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. Both approaches have advantages, Obradović said, but they can also both be tainted by cultural biases.

For starters, measures that work in one culture might not apply to another. A classic way to test children’s ability to control impulses is the marshmallow test, where children are left alone in a room with a marshmallow for a period of time and told they’ll be rewarded if they wait to eat the snack. Researchers are aiming to measure a universal skill – but the way children respond to this specific challenge depends on their culture.

“If you come from a place where waiting for a snack is culturally socialized, where it’s the default, there’s no impulse to inhibit,” Obradović said.

In a 2022 study to measure children’s ability to delay gratification, led by GEFI network member Yuko Munakata, U.S. and Japanese children were asked to wait before eating and before opening a gift. The Japanese children waited three times longer for food than for gifts, while U.S. children waited nearly four times longer for gifts than for food.

Cultural conventions account for the discrepancy, Obradović said. In Japan, children are socialized to wait to eat until everyone is served, a habit less prevalent in U.S. children’s daily life. And in the United States, gift-giving often takes place on special occasions like birthdays and holidays, so kids are accustomed to waiting to receive them – whereas in Japan, children receive gifts regularly throughout the year, with no tradition of waiting.

A child in Côte d'Ivoire is given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. (Photo: Michael Sulik)

Biases embedded in testing

Direct testing through tasks, often administered on a computer or tablet, is generally considered a reliable way to measure children’s EF skills, Obradović said. But many assessments have been developed in high-income, western countries like the United States, with cultural biases embedded in the test itself or how it’s administered.

A child’s ability to maintain eye contact when given instructions for a task might indicate their ability to focus, but in some cultures, children may not be socialized to make direct eye contact with authority figures. And “gamifying” tasks is a popular way to engage children and standardize tasks, but it can lead to distorted results.

“Gamelike tasks are a lot more relevant for kids who are schooled or for kids who are from a western context, because they engage in these kinds of one-on-one, game-like educational activities all the time,” Obradović said.

Even interacting one-on-one with an assessor might be an unfamiliar experience in some settings. Young children in low- and middle-income countries especially tend to be inhibited in testing situations and hesitant to interact with strangers, and this reluctance could affect the measurement of their EF skills.

EF tasks sometimes use talking puppets to motivate kids to participate, because U.S. children have been socialized to see puppets as approachable and fun. But doing research in rural Pakistan, Obradović found that preschoolers refused to take instructions from a puppet because the scenario was so unfamiliar.

“These tasks work really well in many places,” Obradović said. “But we’re encouraging researchers to use local expertise and pilot testing to see what will work in their setting. We’re helping them think through the questions to ask and giving them ideas about how to adapt the tests.”

An assessor works with a child in Bangladesh. New guidelines developed by the Global Executive Function Initiative at �� provide recommendations to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Scaling up guidance

The guidelines developed by Obradović and her GEFI colleagues grew, in part, from seeing a need to scale up and standardize the ad hoc guidance she’s extended over the years.

Obradović has worked for more than a decade in the Global South, adapting standard EF tasks to the culture of the populations she studies. “Periodically I’ll get emails from researchers asking, ‘Can you send me your tasks?’ or ‘How would you modify this?’ ” Obradović said. “I’m glad to share with anyone, and I’ve always kept everything open-source. But at the end of the day, a lot of these decisions come down to a judgment call, and I wanted to widen the circle of people making those calls, to pool our knowledge and experience.”

In addition to recommendations for making standard EF tasks culturally meaningful, the new guidelines from GEFI include considerations for working with children of different ages and in various spaces, strategies for training assessors, and procedures for processing and analyzing the data. More standardization and transparency in how data is processed will also advance scientific understanding. “We also offer cautionary notes for how not to misinterpret findings,” says Obradović.

Obradović and her colleagues also recently launched a major survey of educators, parents, and researchers around the world, seeking out examples of everyday experiences linked to EF skills – common activities that require children to do things like wait their turn, pay attention, remember lengthy instructions, or work on a project with others. In the United States, for instance, a typical children’s household task that requires focus and persistence could be folding laundry or putting away groceries; in Bangladesh, tying up bundles of rice paddy as part of farm work might be more familiar, or in Malawi, walking to collect water.

GEFI has begun piloting its tools in more than a dozen countries in the Global South, and GSE doctoral students are among the researchers involved in developing and evaluating the resources, including Kavindya Thennakoon working in Sri Lanka, Mateus Mazzaferro in Brazil, and Ishita Ahmed in Bangladesh.

“In rural Bangladesh, children are constantly learning from their parents and using EF skills while they work on the farm or at a local business,” said Ahmed, whose doctoral research is focused on developing culturally relevant measures of learning, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. “Measuring these skills is important, to shed light on how policy is effective. But I’m not going in with assumptions about what the measure should look like. Measures should represent local experiences.”

By advancing research into ways to measure these skills in different cultural settings, Obradović hopes that GEFI’s work will help identify programs and policies to support EF development worldwide.

“We need rigorous, open-source, scalable assessments to understand all children’s learning capacities and needs – not just those in Western, high-income countries,” she said. “There’s much more work in this space to be done.”

The Global Executive Function Initiative at �� has been supported by funding from the Jacobs Foundation.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jelena Obradović

Improving education by design

Carrie Spector — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 22:56:58 +0000

Improving education by design

Carrie Spector Tue, 04/02/2024 - 15:56

Students collaborate with community partners in a �� course cross-listed by the d.school and the Graduate School of Education. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead)

Impact | Innovation | International Education

A new �� course connects students with partners around the globe to innovate novel approaches to educational challenges.

March 26, 2024

by Isabel Sacks

A gong sounded in an upstairs classroom at the �� d.school. Students circled small round tables, perched on stools, with a whiteboard behind each group and sticky notes and markers spread in front of them.

There were undergraduate, master's, doctoral, and Distinguished Career Institute (DCI) students in the room, coming from fields as diverse as education, engineering, business, computer science, and humanities. The students' countries of origin included Barbados, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States. For the interdisciplinary course, Design to Equip Learners in Under-Resourced Communities, each group of students was matched with a partner organization or school to co-design a solution to an educational challenge.

Isabelle Hau, one of the course’s three instructors, addressed the students, who had recently interviewed their community partners to better understand the challenges they faced. “Let’s reflect on our empathy interviews,” said Hau, executive director of the �� Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide hub housed at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) for researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and others to collaborate on learning solutions. She put up a slide with prompts: What worked about the interviews? What didn’t work? What surprised you? What lesson did you learn for next time?

Each group shared reflections with the class. One group, working with the Sablayan branch of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), reported that the rural campus had wifi issues and they had to send questions over email when the Zoom connection failed. Another team had been using an AI note-taking app, which they realized only provided 30 minutes for free, so only part of their interview was recorded. A third group interviewed an overworked charter school teacher in Los Angeles who spent most of the conversation venting, and they were struggling to figure out how to advance their project.

By the end of class, the teams were able to cover a poster with sticky notes describing the scope of their partner organization's main challenges, or “problem space.” They walked around the room, sharing their work with classmates.

As class ended, another of the instructors, Laura McBain, managing director of the �� d.school and K12 Lab co-director, asked the students to take a step back. “Take a picture of your poster,” she said. “Where is there empty space on it? Where are there areas of opportunity? Where can design play a role in addressing the problem?”

Isabelle Hau addresses students in the Design to Equip Learners in Under-Resourced Communities course at ��. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead)

Paul Kim, one of the course instructors, gives instructions for a class activity. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead)

Laura McBain explains design principles to students. (Photo: Isabel Sacks)

Alessandra Napoli, Ramon Segismundo, and Carina Fung discuss their collaboration with PUP Sablayan, a rural university campus in the Philippines. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead)

Students working on an educational solution with CIDE Mexico discuss next steps for their project. (Photo: Andrew Brodhead)

A trinity of flashlights

The course emerged after a series of collaborations between the d.school and the �� Accelerator for Learning, including an equity in learning design workshop and convening for teachers about generative AI. Hau and McBain decided to launch the new course to involve students in the work of co-designing education solutions and brought in Paul Kim, associate dean & chief technology officer at the GSE, as a third instructor. Kim had been working with GSE students for years on implementing and researching mobile technology in education in high-poverty areas in Mexico, Jordan, and Ghana, among other countries.

“The three of us got together and there was a spark,” said Hau. “I’m a strong believer that you find people you love working with and take it from there.”

Each instructor brought a different background and perspective as they helped the students develop their projects. McBain’s background in applying design processes to educational settings helped push the students toward novel and innovative solutions and a bias toward action. “She lives and drinks design,” said Kim.

Hau brought knowledge of entrepreneurship and learning science, encouraging students to come up with solutions that were both novel and grounded in research. Her background with entrepreneur and investor communities gave her an eye for the strategic development of new solutions.

Kim’s years of experience on the ground in schools across the world was key as the students navigated community partnerships. “He brings deep content and field expertise, and helps us ensure we aren’t causing harm,” McBain said.

“We got different ideas from different instructors,” said Alessandra Napoli, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering who researches STEM education. “When it felt like my team was in the dark, they each had a different flashlight.” According to McBain, bringing in instructors with diverse areas of expertise and crafting interdisciplinary experiences for students are key elements of the d.school’s problem-solving model.

The instructors drew on existing relationships with organizations around the world to help build partnerships for the students' projects. Hau had worked with Children’s Institute, which provides early childhood services, and Education Development Center, a global education organization with emerging entrepreneurship education projects in Senegal. Kim brought in Edify, an organization developing educational technologies in Ghana, and CIDE, which conducts national-level education research and supports education in rural communities in Mexico. Additional partners were part of ��’s Ed Equity Lab, including Camden Prep in New Jersey and Birmingham Charter in Los Angeles. Ramon Segismundo, a DCI student, brought in PUP Sablayan.

Seeking out the best solutions in context

The ten-week course started with overview sessions on the design process, learning science, and the education innovation landscape, paired with readings on inequities in education. Then the students conducted interviews with stakeholders from their partner organizations and prototyped possible approaches and solutions with their input. In addition to weekly class time, the teams met with the instructors for “studio hours” to further workshop and hone their solutions.

Carina Fung, an undergraduate computer science major and education minor with a focus on human-computer interaction, signed up for the class despite her already heavy course load. “It’s rare to get to work with real-world problems in my course of study,” she said. “I wanted to develop a really meaningful product to use in real-world situations. This class was too cool an opportunity to pass up.”

Fung went into the course expecting to design a solution based on technology. After her senior year of high school and first year at �� coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed a passion for understanding and improving education technology tools. However, she and her team quickly realized that a tech solution wasn’t right for their partner, PUP Sablayan. The rural university campus had ongoing challenges with wifi, bandwidth, and other technological resources.

“Even though I'm a big proponent of edtech, we didn't feel that this was the correct route to go,” said Fung. That was one of her key takeaways from the course. “The concept of humility in design has stuck with me. Even if you think it’s the best solution, it may not be in context.”

In the end, her team designed a community engagement initiative where teacher training candidates from PUP Sablayan serve as teaching assistants in a penal colony located nearby. Other solutions designed by student teams included an information and communication technology (ICT) course using storytelling and local folklore for young children in Ghana, a podcast recorded by and for teachers in rural Mexico, and a gamified English language learning app for Syrian refugee teenagers in Lebanon.

Embarking on a lifelong journey

McBain said she hoped the course helped to build deeper connections between �� and the community partners, laying the groundwork for continued collaboration. “We are in their journey with them and exist in mutuality with them,” she said. “That’s how we make change.”

Hau stressed the importance of involving students in building evidence-based education solutions, which motivated her to teach the course as part of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

“So far, the Accelerator has focused its theory of change on faculty driving change at scale, and this is a beautiful avenue,” she remarked. “What I would like to see more is tapping into the phenomenal students we have here at ��, and we are still just at the beginning of that opportunity.” Several groups in the course are continuing to develop their project as part of the Learning Design Challenge, another student-facing resource of the Accelerator.

“I want our students to understand how serious educational disparities are and work toward making the gap smaller and smaller,” added Kim. “Education doesn’t change just by innovation, which may not be sustainable or scalable. You also need compassion and commitment. I hope our students will embark on this lifelong journey.”

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What works in education reform? A new database catalogs policies worldwide

Carrie Spector — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 18:50:12 +0000

What works in education reform? A new database catalogs policies worldwide

Carrie Spector Tue, 02/14/2023 - 10:50

(Photo: Nikhita / Unsplash)

Education Policy | International Education

A team led by GSE Associate Professor Patricia Bromley and alumna Rie Kijima introduces an international database of education policy changes.

February 15, 2023

Across the globe, policymakers looking to improve schooling pursue all kinds of educational reforms – policies aimed at changing, for instance, unequal access to education, how student achievement is assessed, or how schools are funded.

Sometimes these reforms are successful, improving students’ and families’ lives and society more broadly. Other times, the reforms end up being regarded as costly failures, poorly executed and driven by political interests. And reforms that work in one country may not be successful in another: Without knowing the context of a particular reform – factors like cultural values, economic inequality, or levels of democracy – it’s not easy to identify what might transfer effectively from one country to the next.

To help researchers better understand the effects of education policies around the world and the forces that drive these reforms, a team from �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the University of Toronto has developed a groundbreaking new research tool: the World Education Reform Database (WERD), the most comprehensive international database of education reforms currently available.

The database contains more than 10,000 policy changes enacted by 183 countries, mainly from the past 50 years. An early study drawing from the database, published last month in Sociology of Education, documents and explains declining numbers of education reforms in recent years. Future work will look at the content of reforms.

“Everything that gets talked about in education comes up in these reforms,” said Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at the GSE, who co-led the development of the database. “We hope this tool will bring a deeper understanding of the forces driving these reforms and their consequences, and that it contributes to strategic policymaking.”

Patricia Bromley

Filling a research gap

The idea for the project emerged several years ago from conversations between Bromley and Rie Kijima, MA ’03, PhD ’13, who was then interim director of the International Comparative Education/International Education Policy Analysis (ICE/IEPA) master’s program at the GSE.

Kijima had been exploring the effects of international assessments in shaping education policy, interviewing policymakers around the world who attributed waves of reform to the testing system. She consulted Bromley, who teaches on global education policy and the sociology of education at the GSE. “We wanted to look into how testing might generate waves of reform,” Bromley said, “but we realized there was no data out there to look at that question.”

The two set out to compile data on national policy changes around the world to help answer this research question, using techniques that Bromley had used in earlier research to code textbook content. “I thought we could apply a similar framework to pull information out of the reports that countries submit to international organizations,” she said.

They assembled a team of research assistants and collected more than 800 reports submitted to organizations such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and UNESCO. GSE doctoral students Lisa Overbey, Minju Choi, Heitor Santos, and Jieun Song have been central in the process, training cohorts of undergraduate student researchers to use a coding system to compile the data on education reforms.

Rie Kijima

Bromley and Kijima, now an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, didn’t initially plan for the data set to become a public-facing database. “But once we began presenting papers that we were starting to develop out of the data, we found there was interest in the database itself,” said Bromley. “People had so many ideas for how they could use it.”

By making the database freely available online, the team hopes researchers will further code the data to capture reforms about specific groups, revealing more about the distribution of these types of reforms around the world, how they may have changed over time, and their prevalence relative to other types of reforms.

Future versions of the database, Bromley said, will include more historical sources, a wider range of documents, and reforms from other databases and studies.

Learn more about and access the database, along with initial research studies developed with the data, at https://werd.stanford.edu.

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Improving education around the world

Carrie Spector — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 18:16:40 +0000

Improving education around the world

Carrie Spector Tue, 11/23/2021 - 10:16

Image: Wisudaboonta / Shutterstock

Education Policy | International Education | Poverty and Inequality

�� economist Eric Hanushek, winner of the Yidan Prize, shares how research can bolster educational outcomes in emerging nations.

November 29, 2021

�� economist Eric Hanushek was recently awarded the 2021 Yidan Prize, the world’s largest award in education research, which grants recipients nearly $2 million to fund a global progressive education project. So how is Hanushek going to spend the cash?

His plans focus on Africa and Latin America. “The schools are just not competitive with the rest of the world,” he said. “A country’s only chance of development is, in fact, improving the quality of their schools.”

On this episode of School’s In, Hanushek joins Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to discuss the need for evidence-based programs to improve education in emerging nations.

Hanushek stresses the importance of having local stakeholders make the decisions for their community. “We’ve had decades of international aid organizations coming in from outside and trying to tell countries what they should be doing…. and the schools haven’t been improving.” A better approach, he says, would be to develop a network of stakeholders who can talk back and forth and share information. “Policymakers in Africa— and probably in Europe, too— get most of their information by calling people from the country next door and asking what they're doing.”

Here in the United States, Hanushek sees a lot of research toward reform but questions the outcome. “How do you make sure that there are highly effective teachers in our most disadvantaged schools where they're most in need? It's remarkable how little progress has been made at answering that question.”

He points to Washington, D.C., as one exception. “They evaluated the effectiveness of their teachers and then paid attention to what they found, which is the amazing part.” By increasing salaries for its most effective teachers and firing more than 500 others, D.C. schools, “while not stellar, have improved faster than any other large school system in the country.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Education around the world

Carrie Spector — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 22:07:02 +0000

Education around the world

Carrie Spector Sun, 02/07/2021 - 14:07

Yuri B /Pixabay

International Education | Poverty and Inequality

Christopher J. Thomas explains why education in the developing world matters for everyone.

February 1, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us all too well that the world’s countries are interconnected. It may be hard to spare a thought for schools in the global South, but Christopher J. Thomas, PhD ’96, argues that we have to care.

On this episode of School's In, Thomas, a social entrepreneur in residence at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and former advisor to the World Bank, shared some startling statistics with hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope.

By 2050, 85 percent of the world’s children will live in Africa and Asia, Thomas said. Ten years from now, those continents will be short nearly 70 million teachers.

Today’s problems—climate change, jobs and technology, public health, inequality, economic well-being—"will need the ingenuity and the resources of every human being on this planet to resolve,” he said.

Thomas discussed how to start building that teaching force even in places that lack basic safety, let alone universities. And he spoke about why it matters on a human level.

“When I look at young people, I see their values, I see their aspirations — for a cleaner world, a safer world, a more inclusive world. I hope schools will give them the opportunity and the skills and the competencies to build that world.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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When schools in Hong Kong closed for COVID-19, �� educators stepped up to help

Carrie Spector — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 17:16:58 +0000

When schools in Hong Kong closed for COVID-19, �� educators stepped up to help

Carrie Spector Tue, 04/28/2020 - 10:16

Schools in Hong Kong were among the first to close due to concerns over the spreading coronavirus, launching a worldwide experiment in remote learning. (Photo: bady qb/Unsplash)

Curriculum and Instruction | International Education | Teaching

�� instructors helped Hong Kong teachers respond to a scenario that would soon spread across the globe.

April 28, 2020

By Carrie Spector

At the end of January, as concerns mounted in Hong Kong over the coronavirus outbreak in nearby Wuhan, families and friends were gathering for the Lunar New Year, one of the biggest celebrations on the Chinese calendar. Students were enjoying the week off for the holiday when word came from the minister of education: Schools would not reopen after the break.

With that, teachers in Hong Kong became among the first participants in what has since become a worldwide experiment in remote learning.

Dozens of high school teachers in Hong Kong happened to be midway through a professional mentoring program led by the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) at �� Graduate School of Education, which includes virtual coaching throughout the school year. When news broke of the school closures, CSET instructors realized they might need to take the program in a different direction.

“We offered the teachers sort of a ‘choose your own adventure,’ ” said Michele Reinhart, a professional development associate and instructional coach at CSET, who oversees the Hong Kong program. “They could hit pause on the coaching, continue as planned or change course.”

Many of the teachers indicated they wanted to continue—but with a new focus on strategies for teaching online. So the �� coaches quickly shifted gears, teaming up with �� Online High School to help equip the teachers for a scenario that would soon spread to schools the world over.

A year of turmoil

The relationship between �� and this group of teachers began last June, when CSET instructors flew to Hong Kong to lead a five-day intensive institute on research-based classroom practices for deeper learning. To help embed the strategies afterward, CSET instructors would provide one-on-one coaching remotely throughout the year.

During the summer institute, Hong Kong was already experiencing some turmoil of a different sort. Last year’s anti-government protests were in force that week and intensified in the fall, prompting some schools to close briefly out of concern for students’ safety.

�� instructors led a five-day institute for teachers in Hong Kong last summer that continued with remote coaching throughout the year. When schools in Hong Kong closed, instructors took the program in a different direction.

“This year has been very interesting, very unusual,” said Carmen Yau, director of education at the Bei Shan Tang Foundation in Hong Kong, which funds the teachers’ participation in the program. “When the schools shut down because of the virus, it was actually not as much of a shock as it might have been, because some had already been closing during the protests.”

But it soon became clear that the COVID-19 closure was likely to last longer, necessitating more sophisticated plans for remote instruction. For high school teachers, an added stress was the pressure to prepare students for Hong Kong’s university entrance exams—which were only postponed from March to April, despite educators’ widespread urging to further delay or cancel them.

Still, for the teachers participating in CSET’s program, one of their biggest concerns was maintaining the connections they’d developed in the classroom as they transitioned to a virtual space. “Engaging students and creating community,” said Reinhart. “That was hands-down what they most wanted to work on.”

Finding experts on campus

To strategize ways to help the teachers in Hong Kong, Reinhart called on Christine Bywater, a professional development associate with CSET, whose background includes a focus on the use of technology in coaching both teachers and students.

“When we started talking, COVID hadn’t really hit the United States yet, so we weren’t in that mindset,” Bywater said. “But I knew there had to be people out there who were already running classes online and doing it really well. I thought, Let’s find them before we try to create something that probably exists.”

She found experts close to home—at �� Online High School (OHS), a private independent school based on the �� campus. About 800 U.S. and international students in grades 7-12 are currently enrolled, attending online seminars with an average class size of 11 students.

“Our classes have always been about creating an intimate experience with a big focus on community,” said Meg Lamont, an assistant head of school and English instructor at �� OHS.

A newfound appreciation

Together CSET and �� OHS organized an online seminar for the teachers in Hong Kong on March 19, at which point schools across the United States had just begun to close.

“The first thing we said to them was, ‘We have such a newfound appreciation and understanding of how hard this has been for you,’ ” Reinhart recalled. “They were so gracious: ‘Yeah, it’s been hard!’ ”

As the forerunners, Hong Kong teachers had devised many of their own systems for bringing their classes online. “Now, because it’s a worldwide pandemic, internationals and universities have started releasing resources for teachers to use,” said Carmen Wong, assistant program director of education at the Bei Shan Tang Foundation.

The �� instructors focused their guidance on practices for sustaining a virtual classroom community, including ways to encourage discussion, motivate students to stay on track and ensure that quieter kids bring their thoughts into the conversation.

“We talked a lot about the importance of making students feel seen in the online space, that their presence matters and changes what happens there,” said Lamont.

For the �� instructors, the experience of working with the teachers in Hong Kong offered a powerful and humanizing reminder that the stress, anxieties and uncertainties educators are feeling during this time are universal, transcending place and culture.

“Teachers—here and there—all have the same underlying fears: Are my students OK? And how am I going to keep doing this?” said Bywater. “It’s not just a scramble for devices and tools and technology. There are humans and heart in this work, and this global perspective has been very grounding.”

You can find more professional learning opportunities and resources for educators at the Graduate School of Education’s COVID-19 response page.

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High school textbooks present social movements largely as a thing of the past, according to �� scholars

Carrie Spector — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 23:32:01 +0000

High school textbooks present social movements largely as a thing of the past, according to �� scholars

Carrie Spector Mon, 11/18/2019 - 15:32

Emyerson / Getty Images

Civics and History | International Education | Teaching

Social movements increasingly appear in textbooks worldwide — but more often as part of history and less as a form of contemporary citizenship.

November 19, 2019

By Charlotte West

Education might be a powerful force for social change, but textbooks worldwide are more likely to present social movements as historical events than as a form of active citizenship, according to a new study by researchers at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE).

In a study of more than 500 high school civics and history textbooks from around the world, GSE doctoral student Nadine Ann Skinner and Assistant Professor Patricia Bromley found that discussions of both individual human rights and collective social movements have increased in textbooks since World War II.

But while human rights have been widely included in civics textbooks, social movements are more likely to appear in history textbooks—potentially discouraging teachers from introducing collective action as a way for students to engage in civic life, the researchers said.

“We were excited to see that there have been efforts to teach students more about collective action, but we were concerned that it hasn’t been presented as part of contemporary citizenship in the same way that human rights have,” said Skinner, the study’s lead author. “The books that are discussing movements don’t seem to be describing them in present tense.”

The study, which appears in the November 2019 issue of Comparative Education Review, is the first cross-national analysis of how discussions of social movements in textbooks have evolved over time.

Social movements as collective rights

Study authors Nadine Ann Skinner (left) and Patricia Bromley

While research has indicated growth in social movements since World War II, the extent to which these movements have been incorporated into formal education has not been well studied, the researchers said.

Their study distinguishes between human rights and social movements by identifying human rights as those belonging to individuals, while social movements are focused on the collective rights of specific groups, such as women or minorities.

In the post WWII era, human rights began to be seen as universal, stemming from the condition of being human, the researchers said. Social movements, on the other hand, often challenge current power structures, including the government itself, on behalf of marginalized groups.

“The collective nature of social movements makes them contentious because they can put groups in conflict with each other, as well in conflicts with the state,” Skinner said.

The researchers suggested this distinction might account for why social movements are more frequently relegated to the annals of history. “By framing social movements as historical events that have ended, and the challenges overcome, the state may discourage further investigation of current injustices related to ethno-racial divisions, gender, labor, or the environment,” the study noted.

As one example of how social movements are presented as finite historical events, Skinner pointed to a U.S. history textbook that addresses progress made by the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. In the book, students are asked to think about what opportunities minorities have today that they didn’t have before, which assumes that the struggle for civil rights was a thing of the past, she said.

Why textbooks?

The researchers analyzed 556 secondary school textbooks from 80 countries published between 1950 and 2011. To collect data for the project, Bromley spent two months at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany, which houses one of the largest textbook collections in the world.

Previous research has shown how textbooks have been used to promote intolerance and nationalism as well as peace and global citizenship. Skinner and Bromley set out to study textbooks to get at how human rights education and social movements reflect wider social values.

“There's a basic assumption that the content of textbooks matters, both because it reflects predominant assumptions of what's considered legitimate or important, and also because it tells students that something is a legitimate narrative,” Bromley said.

Tracking global trends

Looking at textbooks from around the world also allowed Skinner and Bromley to track global trends in education, including an increase in discussions of human rights and social movements from one decade to another.

Their research also revealed the globalized character of the changes. “Despite some regional differences, we see many similarities in the trajectories in countries and regions over time,” Bromley said.

While the study did not discuss specific countries, Skinner noted regional variations in the data. The Middle East, for example, was less likely than the West to discuss the women's or labor movement, while East Asia was more likely to discuss the environmental movement. They also found that Latin American and Sub-Saharan African textbooks were more likely to discuss human rights than other regions of the world.

The researchers hope their study brings awareness to the value of infusing collective action into citizenship education. “That in itself would be a big shift,” Bromley said. “Some of the biggest changes in the world have happened through social movements and collective action.”

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The hidden messages in textbooks

Carrie Spector — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 17:17:27 +0000

The hidden messages in textbooks

Carrie Spector Wed, 08/21/2019 - 10:17

Tiyas / Getty Images

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | International Education

�� education professor Patricia Bromley looks at how schoolbooks reflect—and drive—changes in society.

August 5, 2019

Important political and cultural messages are embedded in textbooks in the United States and around the world, says Patricia Bromley, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education whose research includes studying changes in civic education worldwide.

On this episode of School’s In, Bromley joins GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about how textbooks have changed over the decades, both mirroring and advancing political viewpoints.

She points to one striking example in Texas, where statewide history curricula include Moses as an influence on the founding documents of the United States. “No other states have that as part of their standards,” she says. Countries undergoing major cultural, political and economic shifts also use textbooks to establish new national norms, she adds: Changing textbooks “are often a centerpiece of how new regimes seek to roll out what they’re trying to do in the country.”

“I don’t think we can ever get outside a system where [textbooks] aren’t representing some kind of values,” she said. “They can represent different sorts of values, ones we decide to call ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ and there should be conversations about that. But they always have values embedded in them.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM Insight channel 121, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Patricia Bromley

Computer science college seniors in the United States outperform peers in China, India and Russia, new research says

Carrie Spector — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:56:42 +0000

Computer science college seniors in the United States outperform peers in China, India and Russia, new research says

Carrie Spector Tue, 03/19/2019 - 09:56

Sidekick / Getty Images

Higher Education | International Education | Science and Math Education

U.S. undergraduate programs appear to produce more skilled computer science students on average, according to ��-led research.

March 19, 2019

By Alex Shashkevich

Undergraduate computer science programs at universities and colleges in the United States appear to produce more skilled students on average than equivalent programs in China, India and Russia, according to new ��-led research.

An international group of scholars led by the Graduate School of Education’s Prashant Loyalka found that undergraduate seniors studying computer science in the United States outperformed final-year students in China, India and Russia on a standardized exam measuring their skills. The research results were published on March 18 in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

International comparison of universities usually falls in the domain of popular news rankings and general public perception, which rely on limited information and do not consider the skills students acquire, Loyalka said. That’s why he and his team wanted to collect and analyze data on what students learn in colleges and universities in different countries.

“There is this narrative that higher education in the United States is much stronger than in other countries, and we wanted to test whether that’s true,” said Loyalka, who is also a center research fellow at the Rural Education Action Program in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “Our results suggest that the U.S. is doing a great job at least in terms of computer science education compared to these three other major countries.”

The findings

As part of the study, the researchers selected nationally representative samples of seniors from undergraduate computer science programs in the U.S., China, India and Russia. Students were given a two-hour standardized computer science test developed by the nonprofit testing and assessment organization Educational Testing Service. In total, 678 students in China, 364 students in India and 551 students in Russia were tested. In the United States, the researchers used assessment data on 6,847 seniors.

The test, which aligns with national and international guidelines on what should be taught, probed how well students understand different concepts and knowledge about programming, algorithms, software engineering and other computer science principles.

Researchers found that the average computer science student in the U.S. ranked higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India and Russia, Loyalka said. In contrast, the difference in scores among students in China, India and Russia was small and not statistically significant.

Researchers also compared a smaller pool of students from top-ranking institutions in each country. They found that the average student in a top computer science program in the U.S. also ranked higher than about 80 percent of students from top programs in China, India and Russia. But the top Chinese, Indian and Russian students scored comparably with the U.S. students from regular institutions, according to the research.

The researchers also found that the success of the American students wasn’t due to the sample having a large number of high-scoring international students. The researchers distinguished international students by their language skills. Of all sampled U.S. students, 89.1 percent reported that their best language is only English, which the researchers considered to be domestic U.S. students.

“There is this sense in the public that the high quality of STEM programs in the United States is driven by its international students,” Loyalka said. “Our data show that’s not the case. The results hold if we only consider domestic students in the U.S.”

The researchers also found that male students scored moderately higher than female students in each of the four countries.

“The difference between men and women is there in every country, but the gaps are modest compared to the gaps we see between countries and elite and non-elite institutions,” Loyalka said.

Further research

The new research is a part of a larger effort led by Loyalka to examine the skills of students in science, technology, engineering and math fields in different countries. In another forthcoming paper, he and his collaborators examine other skills among students in the same four countries. Further research will also look at the relationship between skills developed in college and labor market outcomes, he said.

Another major goal of the research team is to look more deeply at what might be driving the difference in the performance among countries.

“We’re looking at different aspects of the college experience including faculty behavior, instruction and student interactions,” Loyalka said. “One of our major goals is to see what types of college experiences could contribute to better student performance.”

Other �� co-authors on the paper included doctoral students Angela Sun Johnson and Saurabh Khanna as well as Ashutosh Bhuradia, a project manager for the research.

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When schools in Hong Kong closed for COVID-19, ������������ educators stepped up to help

High school textbooks present social movements largely as a thing of the past, according to ������������ scholars

The hidden messages in textbooks

Computer science college seniors in the United States outperform peers in China, India and Russia, new research says

�� initiative reveals racial, gender, other disparities in Brazilian schools

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

When schools in Hong Kong closed for COVID-19, �� educators stepped up to help

High school textbooks present social movements largely as a thing of the past, according to �� scholars