Tagged: Education

  • October 5, 2016

    Rachel — like #YesAllGirls — is determined to go to school

    Written by
    Rachel Daniel, 4 Pillars PLUS student, Government Secondary School Federal Housing Estate, Nigeria
    Hannah Orenstein, Digital Manager, Malala Fund
    Rachel

    Photo Credit: Dooshima Orjime, 4 Pillars PLUS project

    In the beginning of September, Malala challenged girls around the world to show their support for refugee girls by sharing a #YesAllGirls photo — just like she did with her classmates.

    Girls (and boys!) from all over posted picture after inspiring picture, with each group seemingly larger than the last. One of our favorite photos came from the students at JSS Government Secondary School Federal Housing Estate in Calabar, Nigeria.

    Rachel, a 13-year-old student enrolled in the Cross River State school, shared her story.

    “After my dad married my mum, they had my sister and I. My father did not care for my mum because he gave her only female children. He kept late nights and had other women. My mum left after she couldn’t take it anymore. She also left us at a tender age with our grandmother. My father married another woman, who had male children for him. My step mum told my dad to send us out of the house which he did. My sister was serious about writing her Senior Secondary Exams; but due to lack of parental guidance and care on the part of both my mum and dad, my sister failed her exams. This has made life more depressing for her. Anytime I see my sister I cry, because her education has ended from the lack of concern on the part of my father, it makes me sad. I pray for my sister and don’t want her life stagnated or her education ending just like that.

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  • March 1, 2016

    How do we promote equity in education? A new research initiative

    Written by
    Carina Omoeva, Director for Research and Evaluation, Global Education, FHI 360
    Eric Eversmann, Senior Director for Basic Education, Save the Children

    Rising inequality is one of the greatest challenges facing the global community today – and equity is rightly at the heart of the new development agenda, reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals and the Education 2030 Incheon Declaration. Nowhere is the challenge of equity more salient than in education, with its potential to positively shape life outcomes – or further exacerbate societal disparities.

    How prepared are we in the education community to address this challenge? Do we have the right tools, metrics, and interventions to track our progress in educational equity? While we have gathered gender-disaggregated data for decades, our collective practice in tracking equity across other dimensions has been far from deliberate. Just as quality proved a blind spot in the early years of the previous goals period, there is a risk that inequality in education outcomes and resources will go unmeasured, unreported, and unaddressed. Without attention to equity now, we may soon find ourselves scrambling to address the equity gap, just as we scrambled to address the learning gap that emerged under the focus on access.

    Read the full blog here.

  • January 6, 2016

    Developing girls’ mathematics identity through teacher education

    Written by
    Felicia Moore Mensah, Professor of Science and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

    A disturbing trend has developed showing that decreasing numbers of girls and women are majoring and entering careers in science, mathematics, engineering, technology and computer science (STEM-CS). Some of this decline is attributed to how math is taught in schools. If students do not find math interesting, if the teaching of math is described as boring or not fun, and if students do not see the relevancy or application of math in their personal lives, then students and girls particularly are not going to be interested in or pursue careers in mathematics or any of the other STEM-CS fields.

    Since math and science both suffer from teacher and student low self-efficacy, it is extremely important to make these subjects interesting and relevant. Thus, much of my role as a science teacher educator working with preservice and in-service elementary teachers is to begin building a foundation for them to become reacquainted with math and science and to excite an interest of learning these areas, so that they can do the same for their students. Below I outline a few ways teacher education can support the development of girls’ math identity. A first step is to encourage a math and science identity with teachers during their teacher preparation with the hope that they will foster math and science identity with their students.

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  • July 21, 2015

    The power of ICT to catalyze learning

    Written by
    Rebecca Potts, Program Officer, Global Learning Business Unit, FHI 360

    One effective way of improving the quality of education in low- and middle-income countries is to invest in information and communications technology (ICT).

    Providing schools with internet access and computer hardware opens doors to an abundance of information that teachers and students can use to make lessons more relevant and effective. Teachers can use online portals to connect with each other and to share lesson plans and best practices, while students can use ICT to access online libraries and to master new technologies.

    Many of FHI 360’s education projects use ICT as a tool to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, encourage community participation in education and increase school access. Bringing ICT to middle school classrooms in Senegal was a critical part of FHI 360’s Education de Base project. This project, which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and reached more than 93,000 students and 4,500 teachers in Senegal, won the Innovating Secondary Education Skills Enhancement Prize from the group Results for Development. The prize was awarded, in large part, because of its effective use of ICT.

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  • June 25, 2015

    Math identity is the key to girls’ math success

    Written by
    Merle Froschl, Co-Director, Educational Equity, FHI 360
    Barbara Sprung, Co-Director, Educational Equity, FHI 360
    Photo: Jessica Scranton/FHI 360

    Photo: Jessica Scranton/FHI 360

    Girls get the message — from the toys they play with, the TV shows they watch and the attitudes of their parents, teachers and peers — that math is NOT for them! From an early age, girls are taught that math success is about an innate ability that they lack and that being feminine and being good at math are mutually exclusive.

    As a result, girls do not develop a positive math identity — an identity that research tells us is key to their interest, participation and persistence in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and careers. Without a solid background in math, girls will not develop the critical STEM skills that will be required for 60 percent of the new jobs that will become available in the 21st century.

    There are two pillars of a positive math identity: the belief that you can do math and the belief that you belong. Identity is fluid and dynamic. It is developed through social practice, and it is through social practice that learners develop a sense of who they are. There is no such thing as a “math gene” or a “math brain,” but the myth is perpetuated, and it is particularly harmful to girls and students of color. Teachers and parents often unconsciously convey stereotyped messages that girls do not need to be good in math.

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  • March 12, 2015

    Taking a student-based approach to youth development

    Written by
    Elizabeth Buckner, Research Associate, Education Policy and Data Center

    How do we best meet the needs of adolescents, recognizing that the world they are entering is rapidly changing?

    Youth programming should focus on the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood, rather than on the reduction of behavioral problems, a past trend. Such programming ensures adolescents’ mental and physical health, as well as provides opportunities to develop positive social values, human and social capital, a sense of well-being and an ability to make sound choices.

    Unfortunately, donor-funded discourse on secondary education reform is still dominated by a dialogue on expanding access and improving quality in education. Youth development and large-scale secondary school reform usually operate on parallel tracks, with youth development approached through afterschool, extracurricular or nonformal programming.

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  • September 8, 2014

    Tapping the potential of literacy for conflict mitigation

    Written by
    Emily Koester, Literacy Technical Officer, FHI 360

    Development organizations are increasingly being asked to provide education in places that have been torn apart by wars and other conflicts. Reading and writing instruction is often pushed to the forefront of education-in-conflict interventions, because literacy is a foundational skill for future education and success in the workforce. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) goal of improving the reading skills of 100 million children by 2015 emphasizes the value of literacy.

    Importantly, literacy also offers the potential to mitigate conflict. Instructional materials to develop literacy can include stories that model peaceful problem solving, value diversity (through characters who identify with various ethnic groups, for example) and communicate important information about safety and emergency measures.

    Despite the possible benefits, building literacy in conflict situations is complex. Common challenges, such as limited materials and infrastructure, militarized populations and psychosocial trauma, require substantial creativity and innovation in literacy programming. FHI 360 is addressing these challenges in three key ways:

    First, we are gaining knowledge to inform practice. Education in conflict is an understudied field, and very little is known about best practices for literacy instruction in conflict contexts. In 2014, JBS International commissioned an important research report by Lesley Bartlett and Zeena Zakharia, which provided “the first steps in developing a framework for literacy education in conflict- and crisis-affected contexts.”

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  • June 11, 2014

    A youth leader speaks out on the importance of girls’ education in Nigeria

    An Interview with
    Naomi

    Naomi

    What prevents girls in Nigeria from receiving a quality education?

    Girls in Nigeria face many obstacles. These include high school fees, gender inequality and other social pressures that cause them to drop out. Security is a big risk for many girls, especially since the recent kidnappings. Some girls are just too afraid to go to class. The conditions at school can also be a challenge. My class has 50 students and no fan. Some classrooms have no ceiling, no fan and even more students. At certain times of the day, like when the sun is directly overhead, it is too hot for students to even sit in the classroom and impossible for them to concentrate and learn.

    Some policies also limit girls. If a girl is pregnant, she cannot return to school after she has her baby. One mistake should not be the end of a girl’s education.

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  • January 28, 2014

    How many children enroll in school, stay in school and gain basic reading skills?

    Written by
    Ania Chaluda, Research Associate, Global Education, FHI 360

    The last decades have seen an impressive growth in school participation in developing countries. As countries have made remarkable progress toward universal primary school completion, the focus in the development community has shifted to reaching the most disadvantaged children and improving the quality of education. It has been recognized that even though universal primary completion is a major milestone for many countries, the quality of an education system cannot be assessed only by its ability to enroll and retain students. Most importantly, school should teach valuable skills that will help children achieve their full potential in life.

    FHI 360’s Education Policy and Data Center (EPDC) has released a research brief, “Long Path to Achieving Education for All: School Access, Retention, and Learning in 20 countries,” which uses learning pyramids as a visual tool to show cumulative achievement of education systems and demonstrate how many children enroll in school, whether they remain enrolled until they reach a certain grade, and what percentage of them learn how to read. The report finds that although access to education is close to universal in most countries, not all of the students who enter school reach upper primary grades. Grade repetition is a common experience for many primary students, creating inefficiencies in education systems. Finally, a large number of those who reach the upper primary grades never gain basic literacy skills, defined as the lowest benchmark of a standardized learning assessment.

    Pyramids: starting from access, through retention, to learning

    The pyramids provide a snapshot of a country’s progress in providing universal school entry (access), keeping students in school (survival), and finally, teaching them at least minimum reading skills (learning). To measure school access, EPDC uses the percentage of 14-year-olds who have ever entered school. Retention is described by school survival rates — the percentage of enrolled students expected to reach a given grade. The level of learning is determined by using data from standardized learning assessments, including SACMEQ, PIRLS, SERCE, and PASEC.

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