What’s the most important published research in international education in the past 20 years?

By Simon King

How many peer-reviewed academic journals do you read in a year from front to back? The reality is that it is not that many for most of us. Given the time and mental energy to focus, we often just read the abstract or skim the article, perhaps jumping to the findings or conclusion. And that’s okay. 

However, given the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles on education published annually, it is easy to miss what’s important. So, let’s ask a follow-up question: What is the most critical research on international education published over the past 20 years? 

What isn’t the most important? 

Impact evaluations. Randomized-control trials (RCTs). Without jumping too far into the debate over their merits, generalized impact evaluations rarely explain how and why. When the impact is generalized down to a single number, we are always left asking, “and..?” Impact evaluations have their place in international education, but let’s not presume they’re the evaluation jewel in the crown just because we are told that they are. 

What qualifies as the most critical research?  

The challenge in internal education has been clear for quite a while now: How do lower and middle-income countries (LMICs) successfully implement education programs at scale? Given the statistically significant but low impact in real terms of many reading programs, how do we unlock the potential of millions of teachers on the planet? I’ve not yet heard that anyone has categorically solved this problem. Part of the problem is we lack a proper understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. So, is there any published research that points us in the right direction? 

For me, there can be only one. 

Teachers seem unaware of the skill level of their children. 

I believe the paper “Out of sight, out of mind? The gap between students’ test performance and teachers’ estimations in India and Bangladesh” by Djaker, Ganimian, and Sabarwal is a game changer.  

This article presents a study in which teachers in India and Bangladesh were asked to estimate their pupils’ skill levels, which were then compared with the actual pupil skill levels. The correlation between the estimates and actual scores was calculated. A simple interpretation of correlation is that 1 means a perfect association, and 0 means no association. It was found that in Bangladesh, the correlation was between 0.11 for language and 0.36 in India for mathematics, suggesting a low association between the teacher estimate and the actual pupil skill levels.   

The results suggest that teachers have a very poor understanding of the actual skill levels of their students. As a comparison, the article also mentions that the aggregated correlation in high-income countries is 0.65, so teachers in these countries are far better at knowing their pupils’ skill levels.  

Why are these findings so important? 

The journal article neither tells us what works nor informs us about associations between teaching characteristics and positive learning outcomes. Instead, it informs us about system-wide issues that, unless addressed, will prevent teachers from meeting their students’ learning needs.  

Using a different analysis approach, the findings of a gap between teacher perception of student skill levels and actual skill levels have been replicated in Tanzania and Nigeria. The solution is not necessarily apparent to everyone working in international education. 

 “A Culture of Adaption” 

Paola Alvarez says we need a “Culture of Adaption,” which means a collective shift to instruction driven by students’ learning, which informs teachers on how to modify their instructional approach. Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, similarly comments that education systems need to focus on pupil learning rather than curriculum, suggesting “…that a change in mindset is required across various actors at different levels of the system.”  

Why introducing assessment is not enough. 

From a distance, the notion of introducing assessment to track pupil learning seems an excellent solution to the problem mentioned in the article. The problem with this idea is that we can add all the assessments we want, but the issue we need to solve, as mentioned above, is what I would call a social norm. Education systems that use hierarchical approaches and cascade changes from a central source can be great at addressing accountability and fidelity. Many reading programs already have different types of assessments. Most are used to either report outcomes back up through the system or grade/rank pupils. Introducing formative assessments for teachers will fail if the system continues to push for fidelity to curriculum instruction as described in the teacher manual lesson plans. 

Addressing the learning crisis is a lot harder than we’d like to hope. 

However, the first step is clearly understanding the problem we are trying to solve. Most LMIC education systems focus on curriculum. Periodically, policymakers and politicians decide to change the curriculum, so teachers must again learn new content and become familiar with new classroom resources. All this constant change deflects attention away from the actual challenge: focusing on individual pupil learning.  

Friday Learning Lab

This series will explore education programming and suggest where system “transformation” is more necessary than system “strengthening.” We’ll examine why many components of education programs (specifically Foundational Literacy and Numeracy) are often born out of habit and gut instinct rather than evidence and practice. We’ll suggest alternative pathways supported by research and practice in education and the social sciences.

We don’t have all the answers

It’s our desire to enthusiastically encourage discourse and discussion that leads to greater collaboration and understanding of how to support students, educators and other stakeholders. But we cannot effectively support local education systems unless we have an international education sector with a culture that encourages innovation rather than just repeating habits and behaviors that have already had little impact. Join us in this conversation and be a part of the journey to critically examine education systems, our ingrained approaches and sparks of innovation with the potential to move the needle on children’s literacy.