1. Home
  2. All news
  3. What is the Place of TERCE Data in International Agendas?
Shutterstock - Boy writing

What is the Place of TERCE Data in International Agendas?

Written on 30 Jul 20 by Esteban Villalobos-Araya, Marcos Delprato
Blog
Cross-national student assessment

 

A Comparison of the Content of Regional Information on School Infrastructure and its Use in Global Reports on Education

Reposted from NORRAG Special Issue 03: Global Monitoring of National Educational Development: Coercive or Constructive? (Published October 2019) 

This article analyses the use of TERCE information in UNESCO’s 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report and the relevance of the information on school infrastructure reported by TERCE for meeting the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, specifically in relation to Goal 4, quality education, and target 4.a, improvement of school infrastructure. The analysis focuses on the case of Latin America and offers TERCE as an example of successful South-South collaboration on data collection and analysis. It is proposed that the production of regional data would facilitate making more pertinent and contextualized recommendations.

This paper seeks to analyze how information from a standardized regional test, the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study of the Quality of Education in Latin America (TERCE) conducted by the Latin American Laboratory for Quality Assessment of Education (LLECE ), is used in the 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR) (UNESCO, 2016). This report lays the foundations for a multidimensional understanding of sustainable education in pursuit of the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The use of TERCE data is discussed as a way to observe how South-South evidence is collected using regional data, which elements are included in this discussion, and, when compared to the information on school infrastructure included in a TERCE- based report, which elements are left out.

At the international level, infrastructure is one of the areas to which most resources have been allocated, towards reaching, first the UNESCO’s 2015 Millennium Development Goals and, currently, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, it is also a category that has not been much discussed internationally. This plays out, for example, if we consider the indicators used in the GEM Report to calculate school coverage. The access to schooling indicators does not include the existence and quality of school infrastructure, both of which are fundamental enabling elements for appropriate access to education. The lack of an indicator that evaluates these points is especially noteworthy given the economic efforts developing countries have made to improve school and general educational infrastructure. 

Global Agendas and Standardised Tests: The Place of TERCE in the 2016 GEM Report

The debate about how global education reports, such as the 2016 GEM Report discussed here, influence the national and regional educational agendas is open and contested.  The existence and quality of school infrastructure, for example, can vary widely. In the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Target 4.a, involves the construction and updating of educational infrastructure, making it a fundamental condition for accomplishing Goal 4—quality education for all. Because they provide standardized and comparable measures related to the quality of education, international assessments of educational achievement are highly attractive instruments for measuring educational quality in global reports. Regional standardized tests such as those carried out by LLECE can be seen as mechanisms not only for counteracting the weight of global tests such as the Progamme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the international discussion on quality education but also for generating monitoring and tracking instruments adequate for particular socio-cultural realities, such as those found in Latin America. The relevance of school infrastructure to supporting and facilitating teaching-learning processes and, consequently, to improving educational quality (Barrett et al., 2013), highlights its importance and the need for an assessment such as TERCE that includes school infrastructure data.

The impact of school infrastructure can be seen in Figure 1, which presents the proportion of students with low achievement (close to 1 or 100% on the horizontal axis) in terms of the level of school infrastructure, as defined by the LLECE index.  Especially in the case of mathematics, the relationship between low achievement and attending a school with poor infrastructure is particularly high.

This point is the key focus of our analysis. Our objective is not to minimize the importance of good teacher training or good school programmes. However, the high sums involved in infrastructure investments and the new challenges with respect to resilient infrastructure associated with global warming (UNESCO, 2016, p. 64), lead us to focus our analysis on the relevant data provided by TERCE and to suggest that the use of similar regional information sources, such as TERCE, could help other countries in the Global South to monitor and evaluate their school infrastructure. This matter is of great importance because the high costs associated with school infrastructure are linked to both the economic situation and the education system of a country.

Figure 1. Proportion of underperforming 6th Grade students in mathematics (TERCE levels 1 and 2) in relation to school infrastructure (authors’ analysis based on TERCE data).
Proportion of underperforming 6th grade

The 2016 GEM Report (UNESCO, 2016) uses the tests carried out by the LLECE as an example of policy coordination among the participating countries to define not only the content of the various instruments used by the evaluation system but also quality education in Latin America. However, despite the fact that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) acknowledge the importance of infrastructure and that Chapter 17 of the 2016 GEM Report discusses the relation of school infrastructure information and communication technologies with educational quality (UNESCO, 2016, p. 17), the infrastructure-related data from TERCE is ignored. The data provided in the GEM Report do not provide a clear sense of the adequacy of school infrastructure. Given this gap, data from TERCE and its predecessor, the Second Regional Comparative Explanatory Study (SERCE) could help to identify simple and objective variables related to basic infrastructure and to more advanced facilities, such as a director’s office, meeting room for teachers, multipurpose space, gymnasium, and science laboratory, which may have direct impact on educational processes (OREALC/UNESCO & BID, 2017).

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has issued reports related to the sufficiency, equity, and effectiveness of school infrastructure in Latin America for both TERCE (OREALC/UNESCO & BID, 2017) and SERCE (Duarte, Gargiulo, & Moreno, 2011). These reports make it possible to assess all of the infrastructure characteristics mentioned above and,  in addition, the presence of adequate equipment inside the classrooms, including desks and chairs for the teacher and students, a board, markers, or chalk. According to the TERCE- based projection included in the IDB report (2017), it was estimated that only Chile would achieve proficiency in the infrastructure areas evaluated for most of its schools (73%). In contrast, schools in the Caribbean countries would have high levels of insufficiency in all the items, even when controlling for per capita income. Countries with similar per capita incomes, such as Panama and Uruguay, would be likely to have very different levels of infrastructure adequacy in terms of access to water and sanitation (44% vs. 66%), connection to services (64% vs. 98%), and academic spaces (37% vs. 73%). These findings would imply that, regardless of national income, public policy priorities can improve advancement in these areas. Presenting a fuller description of these policy decisions would allow the countries of the region, and those in other developing regions, to learn from effective (and ineffective) decisions regarding infrastructure.

Gaps in TERCE and Opportunities to Learn from National Experiences in Latin America

The great effort involved in the production of the 2016 GEM Report and the opportunity it presents to share experiences among developing countries and across language barriers suggests that it would be possible to draw together evidence from Latin America in a more effective fashion. It could be done either by requiring more detailed background information on each country or by increasing the coordinated efforts of Latin American countries to impact the international education agenda.

As a starting point, the Chilean case provides a useful model. Chile has not only included infrastructure in its policies to address the challenge of improving mandatory education but also maintained reliable documentation on aspects such as financing, school design—(including baseline requirements for the number of square meters per student per educational level)—and climate-specific considerations for ensuring infrastructure is sustainable (MINEDUC, 2000). This inclusion of climatic factors in the sustainability criteria used as part of planning for infrastructure expansion makes the Chilean case of particular international interest.

The infrastructure expansion in Chile occurred within the framework of the extension of the school day. It was the result of the work of the national Ministry of Education in conjunction with UNICEF, an alliance similar to that which other developing countries have established to work towards education goals. Colombia is currently involved in a similar process and has also generated guidelines for minimum standards of comfort for students within educational spaces in terms of visual, thermal, and acoustic factors, (Paulsen, 2009) and for the expansion and maintenance of school facilities (MINEDUCACION, 2015). Other recent regional studies of potential international relevance have presented evidence of the impact of investment in school infrastructure in Peru (Campana, Velasco, Aguirre, & Guerrero, 2014), Colombia (Iregui, Melo, & Ramos, 2006), and Chile (Riveros, Concha, Luco Rojas & Saavedra Caviedes, 2015).infrastructure and the challenges of financing, designing, and maintaining school facilities and to facilitate inclusion of regional information in global reports, it would be helpful to establish an analytical and evaluator framework that would make it possible to summarize infrastructure-related challenges and policy approaches in the region. The IDB, which has financed much of the expansion of school infrastructure in the region, has prepared a number of reports on infrastructure which could be used to complement the analysis of the impact of school infrastructure on learning in the countries that participate in the SERCE and TERCE evaluations.

A final key element, and one that is missing from the education infrastructure-related data provided by the LLECE studies, is information related to access for students with a physical disability. Simple questions on factors such as the minimum accessibility criteria for Latin American schools or the presence of restrooms accessible to students with physical disabilities would provide indicators to improve one of the region’s great challenges: equity of opportunities to access education. In addition to what the team developing the next GEM Report is able to generate, these elements could be included in a forthcoming report thus improving the participation of the region in the construction of global education reports.

Endnotes

  1. LLECE is a subsidiary of UNESCO and receives input from the countries participating in the evaluation. It has established itself as a forum for learning and transfer of technical skills among the countries participating in the LLECE evaluations. As a regional entity for technical cooperation on education, it offers a framework for defining standards and for learning from the experiences of neighboring countries with comparable sociocultural contexts.
  2. Although UNESCO’s GEM Report, has not been highly criticized, the debate between Klees (2017) and Benavot (2017) regarding the impossibility of achieving the goals of sustainable development, especially SDG4 on access to quality education, is noteworthy. Likewise, Klees (2017) has criticized the World Bank’s recent report on learning (World Bank, 2018) for its limited perspective on learning, for not considering access as a basic enabler of the opportunity to learn, and for sustaining a vision that blames teachers for shortcomings in the learning achievements of the world’s children.
  3. In this paper we will refer to what is known as “international educational surveys” (Hannum, Liu & Alvarado-Urbina, 2016) as either international standardized tests or as international surveys on education.
  4. The way in which PISA affects the global agendas on what constitutes quality secondary education, the cultural aspects it does not consider (Meyer & Benavot, 2013), the possible powers and intentions involved (Kamens & McNeely, 2009), and the associated measurement problems (Wagemaker, 2008) have been highly contested and are still a matter for debate.
  5. The school infrastructure index constructed by LLECE is a simple index based on the presence of physical spaces— including an off  e for the school director, additional off  es, a meeting room for teachers, a gymnasium, a computer room, an auditorium, an arts or music room, an infirmary, one or more science labs, and a school library: basic classroom equipment such as chairs and tables for teachers; and basic services including, drainage or sewerage, fax, bathrooms in good working condition, internet connection, garbage collection, and student transportation (UNESCO & LLECE, 2015a, p. 170).
  6. These reports can be consulted through the following site.

References

Bookmark this
View PDF