Improving student learning in Mali

Innovation Improving student learning in Mali 16 International Developments ACER has been working over the past two years to help develop an internal monitoring and evaluation system in Mali. Petra Lietz explains. ACER through its Centre for Global Education Monitoring is working with Œuvre Malienne d’Aide à l’Enfance du Sahel (OMAES), a non-government organisation in Mali, to provide support for the development of an internal monitoring and evaluation system. OMAES manages Bεεkunko, a household-based assessment of children’s learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy for six- to 14-year-old children. The long-term aim of the work is to enable OMAES to evaluate the influence of its communication and advocacy activities, and policy impact, particularly in terms of Bεεkunko. Bεεkunko: Citizen-led assessment In partnership with other civil-society organisations, OMAES manages Bεεkunko, a citizen-led assessment program. Through Bεεkunko, OMAES aims to motivate stakeholders at various levels to take action in schools and communities, and become engaged in education policy reform with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Its main strategy is to improve awareness among stakeholders, particularly parents, about the actual learning outcomes of children in Mali. Education decision-making responsibilities in Mali have been decentralised over time to various local and regional levels. As a result, local, regional and national stakeholders are increasingly important in education Dr Petra Lietz is a Principal Research Fellow in ACER’s Australian Surveys research program. reform and in monitoring actual learning outcomes and improving the quality of education. OMAES has now adapted this evaluation approach for three prioritised stakeholder groups: Developing an evaluation approach Since Bεεkunko is an ongoing assessment program, OMAES has identified the need to develop an evaluation approach and tools to enable ongoing data collection for evaluation purposes, and to inform future communication and advocacy activities. • parents OMAES and ACER collaboratively decided that a prospective evaluation approach would best suit OMAES’s information needs. Using this approach, OMAES and ACER staff worked together to further refine stakeholder group definitions and develop measurable indicators for specific outcomes, as well as tools for data collection for the evaluation, and suggested sampling approaches. The evaluation framework also included guidelines for data analysis and reporting, and data use. In addition, an evaluation schedule was proposed, with team members agreeing that the evaluation and monitoring system should be piloted before being upscaled to a greater number of Bεεkunko assessment regions in Mali. • school management committees, and • decentralised education committees at the commune level. OMAES has administered surveys and conducted focus-group interviews to a sample of these key stakeholder groups in one region of Mali to pilot this evaluation approach, and its procedures and tools. OMAES plans to upscale the evaluation activities in 2017, after a review of insights from the pilot to a nationally representative sample of regions that have participated in Bεεkunko and to other stakeholder groups. Further information Measuring the impact of citizen-led assessments for improving the quality of education, by Petra Lietz and Mollie Tobin, is part of the Assessment GEMS series published by ACER’s GEM Centre. LINKS The preliminary results of the stakeholder evaluation are available at www.oames.org Read more about ACER’s GEM research at www.acer.edu/gem Read Measuring the impact of citizen-led assessments for improving the quality of education at http://research.acer.edu. au/assessgems/11/ International Developments 17  (...truncated)