Promoting Children's Learning Outcomes in Conflict-Affected Countries: Evidence for Action in Niger

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Children in conflict-affected countries (CACs) experience profound constraints on their academic learning and socioemotional well-being. Children exposed to violence and poverty come to "school" (formal or non-formal education settings) with poor executive function skills (e.g. working memory, inhibition, attention), emotional/behavioral regulation skills and social-information-processing skills. And the formal and non-formal "schools" they attend rarely use effective strategies to advance their academic and socioemotional skills.What can be done? This project aims to develop both scientific and practical knowledge about how to lift these constraints on children in CACs like Niger. First, we propose to adapt and test novel, low-cost, targeted interventions (LCTs) like Mindfulness (MI) and Brain Games (BG) designed to improve children's executive function, emotional/behavioral regulation and social information-processing skills and, subsequently, their literacy and numeracy skills and socioemotional well-being.Second, even when interventions like MI and BG work, they often work better for some children, in some classrooms and schools, and under some conditions than for others. So this study will examine whether variability in the quality of implementation (e.g. dosage, fidelity) of MI and BG results in the variability in their impacts on children's learning and development in Niger.Third and finally, these types of complex interactions among students, teachers, "schools" and program interventions (like remedial support programs) are embedded in larger systems and broader contexts that may constrain or enable quality implementation of program strategies (such as MI and BG). But there is very little high-quality, rigorous research, grounded in social and systems theories, available in CACs to understand how these higher-level systems influence the dynamic interactions of schools, programs, classrooms, teachers and students. So we will conduct a theory-building qualitative study embedded in the school cluster-randomized field test of MI and BG and their implementation. Through this project, we hope to (a) achieve a dynamic, multi-level understanding of efforts to improve learning processes and outcomes for refugee, IDP, and local children in Niger and other CACs; (b) contribute to the synthesis of the developmental, educational, prevention and social sciences in theory and method; and (c) have a catalytic effect on the education in emergencies sector by identifying effective, scalable strategies that improve children's learning and development.