Investigators: Dirgha J. Ghimire, PI, Brain Rowan, Co-I, William G. Axinn, Co-I.
Description: This project will develop and validate measures of accountability to be shared with the Nepal Ministry of Education (MOE) and use those measures in an analysis of the determinants of accountability and its association with students’ gains in achievement. The study will build on the resources of the Chitwan Valley Family Study, a 20–year ongoing panel study of 116 schools with 3,000 households with 3,500 school-aged children in 151 communities located throughout the Western Chitwan Valley of Nepal. The project has two key aims. The first is to develop and pretest a suite of Nepali Accountability Assessment Tools (NAATs) for use by the MOE and to pilot these tools within the Chitwan Valley of Nepal. Importantly, the tools will be designed so that Nepal’s MOE can both assess and potentially improve its current accountability processes at multiple levels of the increasingly decentralized Nepalese education system. The second is to investigate how accountability processes, environments for student learning (schools, families, and communities), and student learning are related. This involves investigating three main research questions: Are accountability processes systematically related to socioeconomic disparities among communities, schools within communities, and families within schools? In school and community settings where accountability processes are more intensive, is the quality of instructional service delivery higher? And, controlling for socioeconomic disparities related to student achievement, is student learning higher in schools and communities where accountability processes are more intensive?
Sponsor: DFID/ESRC. ES/P005551/1. $916,224. 2017-2020.