International Journal of Educational Development最新文献

This study explored the use of social media among the Ethiopian youth at the time of the political reform. The study employed an explanatory sequential design. Using an online questionnaire, the quantitative data were gathered from 412 university students who were pursuing their education in eight major cities of the country. For the qualitative data, in-depth interviews were conducted with 35 students in four places of the research area. The survey data was discussed using descriptive statistics while data from the in-depth interviews were discussed thematically. This research discerns that the youth had unshakeable loyalty to Telegram (96 %) while they are also dominantly using YouTube (nearly 79 %), Facebook (65 %) and Instagram (53.7 %). It is also discovered that the youths showed a high level of trust on social media (70 %) virtually on par with their faith in their friends (77.4 %) and teachers (72 %) where their entire trust in social media is governed by selective trust mechanism. The entire dependence the youths had on this mechanism, which is exacerbated by the social media algorithm, led to high level of like and share of posts including unproved stories and misinformation which in turn lead to the diffusion of conflict and violence in a vicious cycle. By shedding new light on how members of a collective culture could use the media to achieve group-oriented goals, the study also refutes the widespread view, which predominantly ties UGT (Use and Gratification Theory) with self-oriented aspirations. This study recommends the enhancement of media literacy by incorporating it in the schools curricula and providing media literacy education to the public using various channels of communication (including both mainstream and new media).

Yemen witnesses a heinous war and continual conflict that devastates its fragile infrastructure. The country’s development indicators devolve significantly, and, among other sectors, higher education and its quality have been imperiled. The objective of this paper is to explore the effects of war on the quality of higher education in Yemen from the standpoint of Yemeni scholars. This qualitative study is based on grounded theory design and used semi-structured in-depth interview methods to collect data from Yemeni scholars within and outside Yemen. The core questions focused on the impact of war, the actions taken by scholars, and the prospects of higher education quality. Seventeen diverse scholars were included in the study. The analysis of data outlined six war-related factors that affect the quality of higher education: attacks on scholars, financial constraints, corruption, human capacity shortage, poor research performance, and lack of physical capacity. Realities are reconstructed through descriptions of the trajectory of the war and its negative consequences on scholars and their endeavors. Quality as a sign of the good functioning of higher education institutions is not an exclusively sectorial issue. Actions and prospects need to fit within frameworks of national reconciliation, regional peace, and frameworks of international cooperation. Further research tackling other dimensions of education quality and including other stakeholders is needed. Rethinking and reforming Yemen’s higher education system in its different aspects and challenges, are paths to peacebuilding and the recovery of the country. A roadmap prioritizing this reform is urgently needed.

Inbound Hong Kong students constitute a substantial and growing population at mainland Chinese universities in the Greater Bay Area (the GBA). However, their university experiences and the ways in which they construct sense of belonging to Chinese universities have been under-researched areas. The qualitative interview study was conducted in one mainland Chinese university located in the GBA with ten students in years 1 and 2 of their undergraduate studies. This research challenges the homophily belonging assumption. Collected data suggest that the students made meaning of and operated university belonging counter to the institutional rat race culture on the mainland campus.

We investigate the consequences of pandemic-related school closures on twelfth grade learning, leveraging university application and enrolment data from a selective public university in South Africa. Using difference-in-difference estimation strategies, we find suggestive evidence of learning losses in the school-leaving qualification in 2020, concentrated among lower achieving applicants. We also find a growing achievement gap between lower and higher performing applicants in mathematics. Losses are further reflected in a lower Grade Point Average among 2020 high school graduates who enrolled in university in 2021, compared to those who enrolled in 2021 but graduated high school before 2020.

It is assumed (at least implicitly) that the SDG4 Education for All targets are unlikely to be achieved unless governments commit at least 20% of total government expenditure to the education sector. This article focuses, therefore, on analysing medium-long term trends in the education funding share (EFS) for 40 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2000. The two main conclusions are that the EFS is currently above 20% in less than 10% of these countries and that the EFS has been steadily declining in around half of all countries in SSA.

Using data from the COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey 2020–2021, this study examines the heterogeneous impact of COVID-19 school closures on students' engagement in learning activities during these closures and upon returning to school in Nigeria. First, the logistic regression analysis results revealed that students with less-educated parents, from low-income households, or from households that lost jobs were less engaged in learning activities during the school closures. For instance, students from the lowest consumption quintile were about 22 percentage points less likely to engage in learning activities compared to those from the highest quintile. Similarly, the pandemic reduced the likelihood of students returning to school, especially among girls, older, and low-income students. In addition, engagement in learning activities during school closures for COVID-19, in which affluent students were more likely to engage, increased the likelihood of students’ school attendance at the initial stage of reopening by 8 percentage points. These findings underscore the potential repercussions of the closures to exacerbate pre-existing educational inequality in Nigeria and suggest a need for policies that promote equitable access to education.

This research used the multiple qualitative case study design, aiming to explore the leadership challenges of principals of basic schools in rural Ghana. Specifically, the study was to uncover the latent conditions frustrating the efforts of the principals to improve pupil performance and to explore leadership practices of school principals that could address the challenges and boost rural pupil performance. The study utilised multiple sources to obtain data from 33 participants accidentally selected. The study found that the principals could not do much to improve rural pupil performance because of ill-equipped learning environments, school indiscipline, ineffective instructional supervision, parents’ casual attitudes towards formal education, and mass promotion. The research revealed further that, to salvage the situation, the leaders needed to engage in practices such as vision-driven leadership, people-centered leadership, leadership based on resourcefulness, autonomous leadership, and decisive leadership. The significance of the study, both locally and internationally, was explored.

This paper reports the views and perceptions of randomly selected education policy makers in Southeast Asia, based on surveys of 651 senior public officials in 14 middle-income countries globally. The findings show that officials tend to prioritize increasing secondary school completion over improving learning quality, despite global evidence suggesting that improving learning quality is more crucial for economic growth. Additionally, the surveyed Southeast Asian officials severely underestimate learning poverty and do so at twice the rate of officials from other countries. Officials were most likely to cite system capacity as the primary constraint to improving learning. The findings show that officials’ support for gender equality and disability inclusion is high. Interviewed officials prefer to invest in in-service teacher training or early-grade reading compared to other options such as EdTech or inclusion for students with disabilities. This mix of alignment and misalignment between policy makers’ goals and the stated goals of development partners can inform future engagement in policy dialogue, analysis, and information campaigns.

When governments have more revenue, they spend more on human capital, and spending is more effective in well-governed countries. Here, we use an equilibrium correction model to empirically investigate the relationship between government revenue per capita, six indicators of quality of governance, and school attendance, using an unbalanced panel dataset that includes nearly all countries. The results suggest a strong effect over time: as government revenue increases, school attendance rates increase, and the magnitude of this influence is mediated significantly by a country’s quality of governance. Interestingly, the impact of governance is more pronounced in primary education than it is in lower or upper secondary education. This model offers the ability to demonstrate the impact of increases and decreases in government revenue in an individual country while accounting for the impact of revenue on governance and the impact of both revenue and governance on school attendance.

This essay argues that the existing paradigm in discussions of the acquisition of human capital has been focused on the drive to universal schooling and expanding access and grade attainment. This focus has been quite successful. The expansion of schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the last decades has been impressively rapid, in percentage growth terms much faster than other regions of the world, because SSA at political independence began far behind most other regions.

However, the paradigm needs to shift as “invest in human capital”, which implicitly focuses on the acquisition of valued skills, has mostly been treated as equivalent of “spend on school” and this conceptual elision has produced very mixed results on learning and the creation of cognitive skills, which were, and are, taken to be an important goal of schooling. This section therefore focuses on some facts about schooling and learning with an emphasis on both the question of whether: (i) “Sub- Saharan Africa” has been distinctive as a region; and (ii) the heterogeneity across SSA both in sub-regions and across countries that make generalizations about SSA problematic (if not outright unhelpful).

The conclusion is that there needs to be a shift from the crude “accumulationist” model of “invest in human capital” as exclusively: (i) more years spent in school; and (ii) more spend on school. “Invest” in human capital must mean: (i) acquisition of valued skills, capabilities, dispositions; and (ii) effective spending. This implies three major changes in the research paradigm: (i) stop using “year of schooling” as the major “outcome” to be pursued; (ii) stop using a naïve “education production function” to evaluate impact of inputs towards a systems approach; and (iii) as part of that, work towards a more realistic positive model of the politics of learning