Learning outcomes and teacher effectiveness for children facing multiple disadvantages, including those with disabilities: India and Pakistan

世界各国政府都认识到在包容性教育体系内向所有儿童提供教育的重要性。然而，尽管在过去十年里在让更多儿童入学方面取得了很大进展，但来自弱势背景的儿童可能会经历糟糕的教育质量，限制了他们发挥学习潜力的机会。面临与残疾、贫困、性别、种姓、宗教或他们居住的地方有关的多种不利条件的儿童是最不可能学习的儿童之一。该项目旨在确定战略，以提高所有儿童的学习成果，无论他们的背景如何。人们普遍认为，教师是孩子教育经历的核心。然而，在低收入国家，处境不利的学习者往往面临教学质量低下的问题：许多教师在招聘时本身没有基本的学科知识，接受的培训不足，对支持来自不同背景的儿童的战略的关注有限，激励措施薄弱和教师治理不善可能导致积极性低和教师缺勤率高。因此，这项研究将确定教学的哪些方面对改善所有儿童的学习最重要，从而向各国政府通报支持面临多种不利条件的儿童所需的战略。这项研究将在印度和巴基斯坦进行，这两个国家在广泛的学习不平等方面具有其他贫穷国家的特点。印度在确定应对劣势的战略方面取得了一些进展，而巴基斯坦与其他许多低收入国家类似，还没有这样的战略。由于认识到面临不同形式劣势的失学儿童的学习水平信息有限，这项研究将评估家庭和学校的儿童。这些测试的重点将是儿童在小学阶段应获得的阅读、写作、推理和计算基础技能。一年后将进行一次测试，以确定取得了哪些学习成果，以及这些成果在多大程度上可归因于特定的教师特点或家庭背景等其他因素。这项研究将进一步深入了解教师在课堂上支持不同背景的学生所面临的问题，他们采取的教学实践，以及他们需要的支持类型，以确保他们能够帮助所有儿童发挥他们的学习潜力。这项研究将致力于对如何丰富学习措施以纳入残疾儿童作出重要贡献。例如，除了调整现有的学习评估以用于盲文或使用手语之外，它还将试行衡量学习的其他方面的测试，如自尊和同伴关系，并考虑如何在更大范围内采用这些测试。这项研究将有助于关于2015年后全球教育目标的未来的辩论，这些目标的重点是以确保不让任何人掉队的方式提高学习成果。要实现这些目标，就需要更好地确定不学习儿童的特点，并在各国境内实施战略，以处理课堂多样性的方式加强教学的有效性。

Governments across the world recognize the importance of providing an education to all children within an inclusive education system. Yet, despite great progress in getting more children into school over the past decade, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to experience poor quality of education limiting chances of fulfilling their learning potential. Children who face multiple disadvantages related to disability, poverty, gender, caste, religion or where they live, are amongst those least likely to be learning.The project aims to identify strategies to raise learning outcomes for all children, regardless of their background. It is widely recognized that teachers are central to a child's educational experience. Yet, in low income countries, disadvantaged learners often face poor quality teaching: many teachers are recruited without having a basic subject knowledge themselves, receive inadequate training with limited attention to strategies to support children from diverse backgrounds, and weak incentives and poor teacher governance can lead to low motivation and high levels of teacher absenteeism. The research will, therefore identify which aspects of teaching are most important for improving all children's learning, and so inform governments on the strategies needed to support children who face multiple disadvantages. The research will be conducted in India and Pakistan, countries characteristic of other poor countries in terms of wide learning inequalities. India shows some advances in identifying strategies to tackle disadvantage, while Pakistan is similar to many other low income countries in not yet having such strategies.Recognising that limited information is available on learning levels of children facing different forms of disadvantages who are not in school, the research will assess children both in the household and in schools. The focus of these tests will be on achievement of foundation skills of reading, writing, reasoning and numeracy that children are expected to acquire in primary school. This will be followed up with a test a year later in order to identify what learning gains have been made, and the extent to which these gains can be attributed to particular teacher characteristics, or other factors such as family background. The research will further provide an in-depth understanding of the problems that teachers face in supporting students from diverse backgrounds within the classroom, the teaching practices they adopt, and the kinds of support they need in order to make sure they are able to help all children fulfill their learning potential. The research will aim to make an important contribution to how measures of learning need to be enriched to include children with disabilities. In addition to adapting existing learning assessments for use in braille or using sign language, for example, it will also trial tests that measure other aspects of learning, such as self-esteem and peer relationships, taking into consideration how these could be adopted on a larger scale. This research will contribute to debates about the future of global goals on education after 2015 which are focusing on raising learning outcomes in ways that make sure no one is left behind. Achieving these goals will require better identification of the characteristics of children not learning, and the implementation of strategies within countries to strengthen the effectiveness of teaching in ways that address diversity in the classroom.