Toward the Development of a Rigorous and Practical Classroom Observation Tool: The Uganda secondary school project

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Worldwide, there has been growing interest in understanding the nature of quality education. A major key to this quest lies in what goes on inside classrooms, where children derive the bulk of their daily experiences in academic and social learning. While factors like the physical condition of the school building, textbooks, and teacher degrees play a role in children's learning and life outcomes, they are small and indirect. Teacher instructional practices and classroom processes, in terms of supportiveness and organization, play considerable roles in children's learning and well being outcomes. Yet, the focus of many attempts to improve (and evaluate) educational programs has been based on classic, though simple, input-output model. In other words, an intervention takes place, and then the change in child academic or social outcomes are measured. Studies of this type can be viewed as "black box" studies; they tell us little more than whether the program worked or not. They fail to provide us with insights on how to more effectively facilitate deeper learning. To do this, we first need to be able to effectively measure instructional practices and classroom processes. The most accurate way of measuring instructional practices and classroom processes is with the use of observational methods. To date, available methods have been too labor-intensive and costly for large-scale evaluation studies or for use in daily practice. Reliable, valid, cost-effective, and practically useful tools are needed. Nowhere is this truer than in low-income and fragile states. This is the goal of the proposed investigation. To achieve these ends, we capitalize on a large-scale experimental school and classroom-based intervention program undertaken in Ugandan public secondary schools by the World Bank (WB), in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES). In a second phase of this project, the WB enlisted New York University (NYU) to supplement the impact evaluation by examining the instructional practices and classroom processes with live observations using an innovative tool, known as TIPPS, before, in the middle, and at the end of the intervention year. Samples of these classrooms are also videotaped for more intensive analysis. This data provides a unique opportunity to further develop and validate an innovative, affordable, scalable, and practically useful tool for assessing teacher practices and classroom processes. It also has the potential to provide feedback to teachers, especially when used in tandem with mentoring and reflected practice for improved teacher performance. We conduct a series of scientific studies to assure the viability, validity, and utility of this instrument.In addition to the development and validation of an effective classroom observational instrument, we want to assure its use in policy and practice in Uganda and eventually in other low-income and fragile states. Thus, we begin the project year by working closely with the various stakeholder groups - ministry, union officials, school administrators, teachers, and World Bank Africa Region staff - to facilitate buy-in and ownership. We will engage them in interviews and focus groups to both inform them about the instrument and to gain their assistance in structuring the end of the year workshops for maximum effectiveness. The goals of these workshops are to explain our findings with regard to the intervention and the tool, and more importantly, so that the tool can be implemented at policy levels by the ministry, with the aide of the unions. In this manner, this tool could then be put into practical use in secondary schools around the country, and eventually primary schools as well.