Tag Archives: malawi

Does Effective School Leadership Improve Student Progression and Test Scores ?

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Evidence from a Field Experiment in Malawi 

Evidence from high-income countries suggests that the quality of school leadership has measurable impacts on teacher behaviors and student learning achievement. However, there is a lack of rigorous evidence in low-income contexts, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our new study, with Salman Asim of the World Bank and Stefan Dercon and Donna Harris of the University of Oxford, tests the impact on student progression and test scores of a two-year, multi-phase intervention to strengthen leadership skills for head teachers, deputy head teachers, and sub-district education officials. The intervention consists of two phases of classroom training along with follow-up visits, implemented over two years. It focuses on skills related to making more efficient use of resources; motivating and incentivizing teachers to improve performance; and curating a culture in which students and teachers are all motivated to strengthen learning. A randomized controlled trial was conducted in 1,198 schools in all districts of Malawi, providing evidence of the impact of the intervention at scale. The findings show that the intervention improved student test scores by 0.1 standard deviations, equivalent to around eight weeks of additional learning, as well as improving progression rates. The outcomes were achieved primarily as a result of improvements in the provision of remedial classes.

Read the paper.

Are Short-Term Gains in Learning Outcomes Possible ?

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Evidence from the Malawi Education Sector Improvement Project

This paper presents evidence of the impact of a five-year package of interconnected interventions intended to improve learning environments in eight disadvantaged districts in Malawi. The intervention, which was implemented over five years, provided additional finance to schools to support the hiring of additional teachers and construction of learning shelters to improve class sizes in lower primary, along with constructing classrooms and providing results-based finance to reward improvements in staffing. The interventions were targeted to eight districts with longstanding disadvantages in staffing, learning environments, and learning outcomes, particularly for girls. Employing administrative data and data from a nationally representative independent sample of public primary schools, the analysis finds that these investments closed the gap in learning outcomes between the targeted districts and the rest of Malawi. There is also suggestive evidence that the program reduced learning gaps between girls and boys. The findings suggest that even in a low-income environment with significant constraints, targeted efforts to reduce class sizes can close district-level gaps in learning.

Read the paper.

What Matters for Learning in Malawi?

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What Matters for Learning in Malawi? Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey

I’m delighted that What Matters for Learning in Malawi? Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey, eight years in the making, is now published.

Since the introduction of free primary education in 1994, Malawi has achieved rapid expansion in access to school, but the resulting rapid growth in enrollments have outstripped the increase in resources and capacity of the system to deliver learning. The result is an education system with widespread overcrowding and large disparities in conditions, access, and learning outcomes between schools.

“What Matters for Learning in Malawi? Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey” presents one of the most comprehensive pictures ever presented of conditions, practices, and learning outcomes in a low-income country. Using data from a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of more than 500 schools; 4,000 teachers; and a gender-balanced, random sample of more than 13,000 grade 4 students, this book presents a robust analysis of the school-, teacher-, and student-level characteristics that prevent students from learning. The analysis reveals a strong relationship between the remoteness of a school’s location and inequities in school conditions, including the availability and condition of infrastructure, teaching and learning materials, finance, staffing, and supervision. Large class sizes limit the effectiveness of even skilled and highly motivated teachers. Poor learning outcomes are also evident in schools with high proportions of students who have illiterate parents; speak minority languages; are older than the typical age for their grade; and, particularly, have a poor mindset. A dedicated chapter focused on girls’ learning shows that student-level characteristics account for the majority of variation in learning outcomes; of those characteristics, gender is associated with the biggest inequities.

The book introduces a new Disadvantage Index (DI) as tool to understand the ways in which multiple dimensions of disadvantage at the school level interact, and it models the impact of investing in low-cost classrooms and additional lower primary teachers at the most disadvantaged schools. What Matters for Learning in Malawi? will be of interest to researchers, educators, and policy makers who have an interest in improving learning outcomes in low-income countries and populations.

Read What Matters for Learning in Malawi?

Learning loss from Covid in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Malawi

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Emerging evidence demonstrates that the Covid-19 pandemic and associated closures of schools have been correlated with substantial loss in learning. In Malawi, the Government closed all public schools for a total of 7 months. Employing data from the three rounds of the Malawi Longitudinal School Survey (MLSS) on the same students, twice prior to school closures, and once after reopening of schools, we produced the first comprehensive picture of students’ learning profiles before and after Covid-imposed school closures in a low-income country.

We found that, on average across English, Math and Chichewa (the main language of instruction), students’ learning was 97 points (0.8 standard deviations, s.d.) below where we would project if the pandemic had not taken place (on a difficulty-adjusted scale with 500 as the mean). This is the equivalent to around two years of lost learning in total at pre-pandemic levels.

Of the total 97 points of learning loss, 40 (0.3 s.d., almost one year’s learning) points occurred during the closure of schools. The remainder – 57 points (0.48 s.d., more than one year’s learning) – is the result of a slow-down in learning after schools reopened. If this trend continues, we may see a growing gap in learning over time with students affected by Covid falling further behind their expected trajectories of learning. In Malawi, where learning levels were already low before the pandemic, this will have severe consequences for human capital development.

See the full post on the World Bank’s Education for Global Development blog.