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

世界各国政府认识到在全纳教育体系内为所有儿童提供教育的重要性。然而，尽管过去十年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教育质量差，限制了他们发挥学习潜力的机会。面临与残疾、贫穷、性别、种姓、宗教或居住地有关的多重不利条件的儿童是最不可能学习的儿童，该项目旨在确定战略，提高所有儿童的学习成果，无论其背景如何。人们普遍认为，教师是儿童教育经历的核心。然而，在低收入国家，处境不利的学习者往往面临教学质量差的问题：许多教师在招聘时本身不具备基本的学科知识，接受的培训不足，对支持不同背景儿童的战略关注有限，激励措施薄弱和教师管理不善可能导致教师积极性低和缺勤率高。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为重要，从而使各国政府了解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。印度在确定解决不利条件的战略方面取得了一些进展，而巴基斯坦与许多其他低收入国家类似，尚未制定此类战略，认识到关于面临不同形式不利条件的失学儿童的学习水平的信息有限，研究将评估家庭和学校中的儿童。这些测试的重点将放在儿童在小学应掌握的阅读、写作、推理和算术等基本技能的实现上。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教师的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来自不同背景的学生时所面临的问题，他们采用的教学实践，以及他们需要的各种支持，以确保他们能够帮助所有儿童发挥他们的学习潜力。这项研究的目的是对如何丰富学习措施作出重要贡献，以便将残疾儿童包括在内。例如，除了调整现有的学习评估方法，使之适用于盲文或使用手语之外，还将试行测试，以衡量学习的其他方面，如自尊和同伴关系，同时考虑到如何在更大范围内采用这些测试方法。这项研究将有助于关于2015年后全球教育目标未来的辩论，这些目标的重点是提高学习成果，确保没有人掉队。要实现这些目标，就需要更好地查明不学习儿童的特点，并在各国实施战略，以处理课堂多样性的方式加强教学效果。

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.