Statistical institutes in low- and middle-income countries suffer from previously unseen problems with collecting data on education in today’s background. As the global Covid crisis continues the basic questions for statistical organizations are “what data to collect?” and “how to do it?” to avoid missing data that are crucial to monitor learning. The recent article at World Education Blog provides a vision of action plan to collect relevant and reliable data on education.
According to the article, it is crucial to ensure that education data clearly reflect the consequences of school closures and turning to distance education now, when getting any reliable education data is a real problem. In addition to that statistical institutes should identify which education data that can be collected are the most valuable at the moment to track the structural changes affecting learning that seem to remain after the crisis period.
The authors of the article also think that a relevant country-level strategy to manage education data should include at least the collection and reporting of data on:
- student participation in all platforms of education delivery disaggregated by individual student characteristics, such as gender and poverty;
- teacher participation in all platform of education delivery disaggregated by individual teacher characteristics, such as gender and contract status;
- use of quick and short tests for the frequent measurement of student learning.
The analysis of learning should also take pupil’s age and well being into account. Well-off students have better opportunities to access distance learning as well as junior pupils are less capable to learn on their own.
The conclusion of the article contains authors’ recoomendations for governments and statistical institutes on the action plan on collection of the required data during the Covid crisis to keep track of building an effective and inclusive educational system.
You can find the original article here.
