TRAINING: Eritrea restructures its education system shattered after 30 years of combat
|
In 1991, after the end of thirty years of uninterrupted political upheaval and warfare, Eritrea set up an agenda
to reconstruct its shattered education system. In a country where almost everything was destroyed, the Ministry
of Education now faces enormous challenges. These include expanding access to education, improving teacher
training, implementing curriculum reform, expanding textbook production, and constructing new school buildings.
In addressing these challenges, the Ministry quickly recognized that an important initial step was to establish
an accurate infor-mation system which would help educa-tional planners to monitor the quality of education
and provide research-based guidance to decision-makers on educational policy issues.on-makers on educational
policy issues.
Through the participation of Eritrean educational planners in the IIEP's Annual Training Programme, the Ministry discovered that the IIEP was engaged in a long-term programme of research and training aimed at improving the quality and utility of information gathered for educational planning purposes. One of the key components of this programme has been a series of training workshops through which educational planners may obtain experience in using computers as an integral part of the collection, preparation, processing, and reporting of educational policy research data. |
The main focus of this training has been on dealing with
the kinds of educational indicators that are essential for the development of policies concerned with improving
the quality of education. More than 50 educational planners from ten countries in the Southern Africa sub-region
have participated in these workshops.
In 1994, the Director of Educational Planning and Development of the Eritrean Ministry of Education had discussions with senior IIEP staff concerning the possibility of drawing upon the most important computer-based elements of these training programmes in order to develop an intensive training workshop for educa-tional planners in Eritrea. Further consultations with educational planners in nearby countries indicated that the sub-regional impact of such a workshop would be magnified if invitations to participate were extended to educational planners from the Arab States and the Horn of Africa. In response to these discussions, the IIEP, in association with the Ministry of Education in Eritrea, presented an intensive training workshop which focussed on computer-based techniques for collecting, preparing, analyzing, and reporting information concerned with planning the quality of education. The workshop was attended by 21 educational planners from seven countries1, and was held in Asmara from 4 to 13 December 1995. |
|
The workshop consisted of a mixture of brief lectures and extensive computer laboratory sessions. In addition, a
field-work exercise was undertaken in Eritrean schools in order to gather data which were employed in all computer
laboratory sessions. The tasks undertaken by the workshop participants concentrated on the development of those
computer-based skills required to explore educational policy options concerned with planning the quality of education.
A number of software systems were used to undertake statistical analyses of educational planning data and also to
improve the validity of data entered into computers. All of this work was facilitated by the superb computer laboratory
that was provided for the workshop by the Ministry of Education.
There were two major outputs produced by the workshop. The first was a Tigrinia version of a questionnaire and a test of basic literacy, both suitable for use at the upper levels of primary schooling. These instru-ments were tested at six Eritrean schools and refined to final form based on results obtained from the field data collection and related computer analyses. The ques-tionnaire and test represent an extremely valuable resource that may be used by the Ministry to assess the conditions of primary schooling and the reading achievement of students. |
The second highlight provided an excellent example of the kind of rapid technology transfer that one rarely comes
across in the world of educational planning. On the day following the workshop sessions related to the use of computers
to analyze the integrity of tests and examinations, a small team of Eritreans applied their newly-acquired computer skills
to an analysis of the recently completed English examination for primary schools. This was the very first time that any
detailed psychometric analysis of the technical performance of examinations had been conducted in Eritrea. The results
of the analysis provided new insights into the characteristics of this examination and provided a model example for
improving the development of future school examinations in all areas of the primary school curriculum.
On the final day of the workshop, several round table discussions were held with the participants concerning the possibility
of extending the skills developed in the workshop into further studies of the quality of education. These discussions were
used to guide the preparation of two research proposals designed to develop the capacity of Ministries of Education in the
Horn of Africa and the Arab States to conduct first-class educational policy research pro-grammes concerned with
monitoring the quality of education.
|