World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise

Learning outcomes won’t change unless education systems take learning seriously and use learning as a guide and metric. This idea can be summarized as “all for learning.” As this section explains, a commitment to all for learning—and thus to learning for all—implies three complementary strategies:

• Assess learning—to make it a serious goal. Measure and track learning better; use the results to guide action. • Act on evidence—to make schools work for all learners. Use evidence to guide innovation and practice. • Align actors—to make the whole system work for learning. Tackle the technical and political barriers to learning at scale.

These three strategies depend on one another. Adopting a learning metric without any credible way to achieve learning goals will simply lead to frustration. School-level innovations without a learning metric could take schools offcourse, and without the system-level support they could prove ephemeral. And system-level commitment to learning without school-level innovation, and without learning measures to guide the reforms, is unlikely to amount to more than aspirational rhetoric. But together, the three strategies can create change for the better.

The potential payoffis huge. When children have a growth mindset, meaning they understand their own great learning potential, they learn much more than when they believe they are constrained by a fixed intelligence. Societies have the same opportunity. By adopting a social growth mindset—recognizing the barriers to learning, but also the very real opportunities to break them down—they can make progress on learning. One overarching priority should be to end the hidden exclusion of low learning. This is not just the right thing to do; it is also the surest way to improve average learning levels and reap education’s full rewards for society as a whole.

“What gets measured gets managed.” “Just weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter.” There is some truth to both of these sayings. Lack of measurement makes it hard to know where things are, where they are going, and what actions are making any difference. Knowing these things can provide focus and stimulate action. But measurement that is too removed from action can lead nowhere. The challenge is striking a balance—finding the right measures for the right purposes and implementing them within an appropriate accountability framework.

The first step to improving systemwide learning is to put in place good metrics for monitoring whether programs and policies are delivering learning. Credible, reliable information can shape the incentives facing politicians. Most notably, information on student learning and school performance—if presented in a way that makes it salient and acceptable—fosters healthier political engagement and better service delivery. Information also helps policy makers manage a complex system.

Measuring learning can improve equity by revealing hidden exclusions. As emphasized at the outset of this overview, the learning crisis is not just a problem for the society and economy overall; it is also a fundamental source of inequities and widening gaps in opportunity. But because reliable information on learning is so spotty in many education systems, especially in primary and lower secondary schools, the way the system is failing disadvantaged children is a hidden exclusion. Unlike exclusion from school, lack of learning is often invisible, making it impossible for families and communities to exercise their right to quality education.

These measures of learning will never be the only guide for educational progress, nor should they be. Education systems should have ways of tracking progress toward any goal they set for themselves and their students—not just learning. Systems should also track the critical factors that drive learning—such as learner preparation, teacher skills, quality of school management, and the level and equity of financing. But learning metrics are an essential starting point for improving lagging systems.

progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals found that of the 121 countries

A recommendation to start tackling the learning cristudied, a third lack the data required to report on sis with more and better measurement of learning the levels of reading and mathematics proficiency may seem jarring. Many education debates highlight of children at the end of primary school. Even the risks of overtesting or an overemphasis on tests.

more lack data for the end of lower secondary school

In the United States, two decades of high-stakes test- (figure O.12). Even when countries have these data, ing have led to patterns of behavior consistent with they are often from one-offassessments that do not these concerns. Some teachers have been found to allow systematic tracking over time. A lack of good concentrate on test-specific skills instead of untested measurement means that education systems are subjects, and some schools have engaged in strategic often flying blind—and without even agreement on behavior to ensure that only the better-performing the destination.

students are tested, such as assigning students to special education that excuses them from testing. In the extreme, problems have expanded to convictions for systemic cheating at the school district level. At

Different learning metrics have different purposes, the same time, media coverage of education in many but each contributes to learning for all. Teachers low- and middle-income countries (and some high-assess students in classrooms every day—formally income ones) often focuses on high-stakes national or informally—even in poorly resourced, poorly manexaminations that screen candidates for tertiary eduaged school systems. But using metrics properly to cation—raising concerns about an overemphasis on improve learning systemwide requires a spectrum of testing.

types of assessment that, together, allow educators

But in many systems the problem is too little and policy makers to use the right combination of focus on learning—not too much. Many countries teaching approaches, programs, and policies.

lack information on even basic reading and math

Formative assessment by teachers helps guide competencies. An assessment of capacity to monitor instruction and tailor teaching to the needs of students. Well-prepared, motivated teachers do not need to operate in the dark: they know how to assess the learning of students regularly, formally and informally. As the next section discusses, this type of regular check-in is important because many students lag so far behind that they effectively stop learning. Knowing where students are allows teachers to adjust their teaching accordingly and to give students learning opportunities they can handle. Singapore has successfully used this approach—identifying lagging students in grade 1 using screening tests and then giving them intensive support to bring them up to grade level.

National and subnational learning assessments provide system-level insights that classroom assessments by teachers cannot. To guide an education system, policy makers need to understand whether students are mastering the national curriculum, in which areas students are stronger or weaker, whether certain population groups are lagging behind and by how much, and which factors are associated with better student achievement. There is no effective way to aggregate the results of classroom-level formative assessment by teachers into this type of reliable system-level information. This is why systems need assessments of representative samples of students across wider jurisdictions, such as countries or provinces. Such assessments can be an especially important part of tracking systemwide progress because they are anchored in a system’s own expectations for itself. And national assessments can provide a check on the quality of subnational assessments by flagging cases in which trends or levels of student achievement diverge across the two. In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has played this role.

International assessments also provide information that helps improve systems. Globally benchmarked student assessments such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, as well as regionally benchmarked ones such as PASEC in West and Central Africa and the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE), provide an additional perspective on how well students are learning. They allow assessment of country performance in a way that is comparable across countries, and they provide a check on the information that emerges from national assessments. And international assessments can be powerful tools politically: because country leaders are concerned with national productivity and competitiveness, international benchmarking can raise awareness of how a country is falling short of its peers in building human capital.

Two other types of learning metrics measured in nonschool settings can be used to strengthen the quality and equity focus of assessment systems. Grassroots accountability movements—led by civil society organizations such as the ASER Centre in India and Uwezo in East Africa—have deployed citizen-led assessments that recruit volunteers to measure the foundational learning of young children in their communities. These organizations then use their learning data to advocate for education reform. Some multipurpose household surveys also collect learning data, enabling researchers to analyze how learning outcomes correlate with income and community variables. Both types of assessments are administered in people’s homes, not schools. As a result, they don’t suffer from a key weakness of school-based assessments: when marginal students drop out, their absence can improve the average scores on school assessments, thereby creating a perverse incentive for school leaders. But household-based assessments yield learning metrics that reward systems for improving both access and quality. This is crucial to ensuring that no child is written off. Even for students who are in school, household-based assessments provide an alternative source of learning data, which can be important in settings where official assessments are of questionable quality.

Why isn’t there more and better measurement of learning? As with system barriers to learning, barriers to better measurement are both technical and political. From a technical perspective, conducting good assessments is not easy. At the classroom level, teachers lack the training to assess learning effectively, especially when assessments try to capture higher-order skills—say, through project-based assessment—rather than rote learning. And at the system level, education ministries lack the capacity to design valid assessments and implement them in a sample of schools. Political factors intrude as well. To paraphrase an old saying, policy makers may decide it is better to avoid testing and be assumed ineffective than to test students and remove all doubt. And even when they do participate in assessments, governments sometimes decline to release the learning results to the public, as happened with the 1995 TIMSS in Mexico. Finally, if assessments are poorly designed or inappropriately made into high-stakes tests, administrators or educators may have an incentive to cheat on them, rendering the assessment results worthless as a guide to policy.

A stronger emphasis on measurable learning doesn’t mean that other education outcomes don’t matter. Formal education and other opportunities for learning have many goals, only some of which are captured by the usual assessments of literacy, numeracy, and reasoning. Educators also aspire to help learners develop higher-order cognitive skills, including some (like creativity) that are hard to capture through assessments. Success in life also depends on socioemotional and noncognitive skills— such as persistence, resilience, and teamwork—that a good education helps individuals develop. Education systems often have other goals as well: they want to endow students with citizenship skills, encourage civic-minded values, and promote social cohesion. These are widely shared goals of education, and it is understandable that people will ask whether, especially in education systems that are already overburdened, increasing the emphasis on measurable learning will crowd out these other goals.

In fact, a focus on learning—and on the educational quality that drives it—is more likely to “crowd in” these other desirable outcomes. Conditions that allow children to spend two or three years in school without learning to read a single word, or to reach the end of primary school without learning to do two-digit subtraction, are not conducive to reaching the higher goals of education. Schools that cannot equip youth with relevant job skills usually will not prepare them to launch new companies or analyze great works of literature either. If students cannot focus because of deprivation, if teachers lack the pedagogical skills and motivation to engage students, if materials meant for the classroom never reach it because of poor management, and if the system as a whole is unmoored from the needs of society—well, is it really plausible to believe that students are developing higher-order thinking skills like problem-solving and creativity? It is more likely that these conditions undermine the quest for higher goals—and that, conversely, improving the learning focus would accelerate progress toward those goals as well.

Paradoxically, lower-performing countries probably do not face the same sharp trade-offs encountered by high-performing countries on the education frontier. Economists use the concept of the production possibilities frontier to understand how producers—or in this case countries—make trade-offs between the production of different goods. This idea encapsulates the debates on education policy in OECD countries on the learning frontier (figure O.13). For example, in recent years many stakeholders in Korea have argued that their high-performing education system places too much emphasis on test scores (called “measured learning” in figure O.13) and not enough on creativity and certain socioemotional skills such as teamwork (“other outputs”). Implicitly, this Korean debate is about whether to try to move up and to the left on the frontier—that is, from A toward B. But in the low-learning trap, represented by “low-performing country C” in the figure, there is so much slack and such a weak focus on outcomes that this OECD-driven debate is not relevant. Country C has an opportunity to improve on both measured learning and other education outputs at the same time. An experiment in Andhra Pradesh, India, that rewarded teachers for gains in measured learning in math and language led to more learning not just in those subjects, but also in science and social studies—even though there were no rewards for the latter. This outcome makes sense—after all, literacy and numeracy are gateways to education more generally.