EQUIP2 Final Report.pdf - Education Policy Data Center

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EQUIP2 Leader Award Final Report
work new perspective, giving her hope that an effort to improve the amount
and quality of instructional time in schools would translate into more
effective pedagogical approaches. At the 2011 UK Forum for International
Education and Training (UKFIET) conference, representatives from the UK’s
Department for International Development (DFID) were also impressed
by the OTL framework’s ability to provide a snapshot of classrooms in
developing countries with measurable indicators. In particular, they were
impressed by EQUIP2’s ability to look at the time loss in terms of resource
wastage. As a follow up from the conference, EQUIP2 team members met
with DFID staff in London to further elaborate potential indicators and
discuss future opportunities for collaboration.
There were criticisms of the research as well. Some argued that increasing
learning time without improving pedagogy or supporting teachers in other
ways is meaningless. In response, EQUIP2 researchers responded that
undermining quality interventions such as teacher training was not the intent
of the study; rather, EQUIP2 aimed to demonstrate and diagnose resource
waste in government education systems to provide the impetus to improve
efficiency. Greater learning time and quality improvement are both necessary
for students to learn. If governments are aware of the very basic issue of
school time loss, researchers argued, they have the opportunity to identify
simple solutions that can potentially have a major impact on learning.
Overall, members of the education policy expert team felt that the OTL
research was a timely, important, and well-received contribution to the field
of international educational development. As one member commented,
The major success of the OTL work was that no one had done it before.
We were asking such basic questions, but no one had answers. It made
people think about the fact that you can do a lot of higher-level work,
such as train teachers, but what is the point if the school is never open?
What if students aren’t showing up? What is the point of revamping the
curriculum if there are no books? We wanted to document what was
happening on the ground. What does a snapshot of a typical day look like?
Why are we surprised that kids can’t read if this is the reality?
In particular, the OTL work was a useful complement to the tools produced
by the Ed Data II program. By collecting and pairing comprehensive data
on time use with the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), EQUIP2
showed how the two measures were more effective together than they were
alone in measuring student learning. Today, USAID and other global policy
makers are increasingly returning to very basic inputs, and members of the