Equivalent Years of Schooling : A Metric to Communicate Learning Gains in Concrete Terms
In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them diff...
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/123371550594320297/Equivalent-Years-of-Schooling-A-Metric-to-Communicate-Learning-Gains-in-Concrete-Terms http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31315 |
| Summary: | In the past decade, hundreds of impact
evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of
education interventions in developing countries. The impact
magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard
deviations," making them difficult to communicate to
policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper
proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of
learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of
schooling" and another in the net present value of
potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that
in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one
standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with
between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending
on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of
a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15
and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that
metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median
structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the
equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual
schooling. The results further show that even modest gains
in standard deviations of learning -- if sustained over time
-- may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and
poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education
metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better
understand the potential benefits of increased learning. |
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