Abstract
The global spread of national assessment testing activities, and the growing pressure to move beyond basic measures of participation in educational monitoring, means that student achievement measures are likely to become increasingly relevant indicators of systemic progress in the developing world. Using data from the CESSP project in Cambodia, this paper incorporates a standard decomposition framework to go beyond simple comparisons of average achievement levels over time in order to better understand the underlying dynamics of change. The results show that recent improvements in student achievement in Cambodia are attributable in part to changes in the composition of student cohorts, although there is some evidence of a tradeoff between increasing participation rates and average achievement. There is also some encouraging evidence that school quality is improving, especially in lower grades where the leveling off of participation is creating a policy window of opportunity. The framework can be easily applied to a growing body of assessment data in the developing world to aid both inter- and intra-national monitoring of education system progress.
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Notes
There is also the Education for All Development Index (EDI) used to track progress internationally. However, the EDI measure for quality—the survival rate to Grade 5—is more related to participation.
Household survey data from 2005 show that the net enrollment rate in Cambodia for primary schooling (grades 1–6) was roughly 80 percent (UNICEF 2008). Allowing for improvement in recent years as well as overage enrollment (which is declining) it seems likely that the grade three survival rate for all children in the country is above 90 percent. However, as more and more of the poorest children enter formal schooling there are concerns about increases in grade failure and dropout rates. These issues highlight the challenges facing countries like Cambodia in terms of enrolling 100 percent of school-aged children, even in early grades.
These sources mainly refer to previous MoEYS national assessments augmented with testing information obtained through specific projects. The results consistently demonstrated rhos of 0.20–0.30. Based on this previous information the actual rhos of 0.30–0.35 used in the various samples are somewhat conservative, and are likely to overstate the number of schools and students that are needed.
About 15 percent of the tested students do not have the full complement of independent variables included in the analysis. The results from the non-response modeling are available upon request, and show that students with higher test scores were less likely to be missing data. The predicted probability of being included in the analysis is transformed into a probability weight and multiplied by the corresponding probability weight based on population characteristics; these two weights together provide the final student-level weight used in the analysis.
See Oaxaca and Ransom (1994) for more detail about this and other options for decomposing variance.
It does not seem likely that the improvement in achievement is attributable to the assessment system itself. The results from the 2006 grade three survey were not widely circulated, and the items were not released. Also, based on student interviews it does not appear that teachers were much more likely to use questions with multiple choice formats in their classes in 2009 than in 2006. For sampling errors a number of comparisons were made between the samples and populations using EMIS data. Table 4 in Appendix A summarizes these comparisons. The results show minimal differences between the weighted sample averages and overall population characteristics. The standardized difference is based on a metric introduced by LaLonde (1986).
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Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Ou Eng (Project Manager) and Lynn Dudley (Chief Technical Advisor) from the Cambodia Education Sector Support Project (CESSP) for their support throughout the CESSP project period. Very useful comments were provided by Deon Filmer and Luis Benveniste. The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, the RAND Corporation or the World Bank.
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Marshall, J.H., Chinna, U., Hok, U.N. et al. Student achievement and education system performance in a developing country. Educ Asse Eval Acc 24, 113–134 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-012-9142-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-012-9142-x