SESSION 1: Abstraction

Let's begin our learning journey with Aida. Find out and reflect about the task she was given and the preparation she had to undergo.

Now that you have learned about Aida's experience and have given insights about her preparation. Let's reflect towards a wider scope. Read an excerpt from a chapter of the 2018 World Development Report below that talks about the challenge of Education - presented as a dichotomy between what "Schooling" and "Learning" is.

Learning and the Promise of Education

Education can be a powerful tool for individual and societal empowerment, but its benefits are not automatic. It is not just that education cannot do it alone, in that much also has to go right in other sectors of the economy and society. Another problem is that if an education system is managed poorly, it can promote social “bads” instead of social “goods.” First, education can deepen cleavages between favored and disadvantaged groups. Young people from poor, rural, and otherwise disadvantaged households not only complete less schooling, but also learn much less while in school. In such cases, education does little to enhance social mobility. Second, leaders sometimes abuse education systems for political ends and in ways that reinforce autocracy or the social exclusion of certain groups.

Finally, schooling is not the same as learning. Education is an imprecise word, and so it must be clearly defined. Schooling is the time a student spends in classrooms, whereas learning is the outcome—what the student takes away from schooling. This distinc-tion is crucial: around the world, many students learn little. To be sure, many students learn something, even in settings facing huge challenges. And students enjoy some benefits from education regardless of whether they are learning. When schools serve as oases of security in violent areas, or when participation in schooling keeps adolescent girls from becoming pregnant, these are real societal benefits. When graduates can use their degrees to open doors to employment, that opportunity changes their lives, even when the degree represents less learning than it should.

Intuitively, many of education’s benefits depend on the skills that students develop in school. As workers, people need a range of skills—cognitive, socioemotional, technical—to be productive and innovative. As parents, they need literacy to read to their children or to interpret medication labels, and they need numeracy to budget for their futures. As citizens, people need literacy and numeracy, as well as higher-order reasoning abilities, to evaluate politicians’ promises. As community members, they need the sense of agency that comes from developing mastery. None of these capabilities flows automatically from simply attend-ing school; all depend on learning while in school.

Research on the benefits of education has begun to reflect this distinction between schooling and learning. In the past, most empirical research equated education with schooling—whether measured by school enrollment, number of years of schooling, or degrees acquired—in part because of lack of other good measures of education. But as the focus on learning has grown, some studies have explored the effects of the skills that students acquire. The results confirm the intuition: skills matter.

The channel by which schooling accelerates ecoomic growth appears to be through boosting learn-ing and skills. Thanks to the growing availability of large-scale student assessments, it is now possible to explore how learning mediates the relationship from schooling to economic growth. While the relation-ship between test scores and growth is strong even after controlling for the years of schooling completed, years of schooling do not predict growth once test scores are taken into account, or they become only marginally significant. In other words, what matters is less the years of education completed than the knowledge that students acquire while in school. Simulations show that providing all students with basic cognitive skills could massively boost eco-nomic outcomes, especially in developing countries. This finding suggests that cross-country comparisons of the years of schooling completed—especially when used to explain economic phenomena—could be misguided if they do not account for the differences in skills acquired during those years. At the micro level, too, growing evidence shows that skills acquisition determines how much individuals gain from schooling. For example, learning—not just schooling—matters in how education affects earnings. Across 23 OECD countries, as well as in a number of other countries, simple measures of foun-dational skills such as numeracy and reading profi-ciency explain hourly earnings over and above the effect of years of schooling completed. These effects extend beyond the labor market. Across 10 low- and middle-income countries, schooling improved mea-sures of financial behavior only when it was associ-ated with increased reading ability. When people had acquired more schooling but not more literacy—which was common in these countries—financial behaviors did not change. Socioemotional skills matter as well: various measures have been shown to significantly predict earnings over and above the effects of schooling and cognitive skills.

Learning matters for health, too. Numerous studies have documented the benefits of girls’ schooling on outcomes such as lower fertility or better child survival, but these studies do not typically distinguish between learning and schooling. There are exceptions, however. In Morocco, research showed that maternal education improved child health through its effects on the ability of mothers to acquire health knowledge. Globally, data from 48 developing coun-tries show that learning is responsible for much of these gains. Each additional year of female primary schooling is associated with roughly six fewer deaths per 1,000 live births, but the effect is about two-thirds larger in the countries where schooling delivers the most learning (compared with the least).

Even limited measures of skills explain a lot. The measures used in the studies just noted are often narrow, capturing only simple numeracy or reading proficiency. Sometimes, the measures are coarse. For example, the 48-country study of the relationship between schooling and health uses as its measure of literacy whether a woman can read a single sentence such as “Parents love their children” or “Farming is hard work.” Yet even these highly imperfect mea-sures of skills have considerable predictive and explanatory power. If better measures of skills were available, skills would likely explain even more of the impacts of education—and the role remaining for the simple schooling measure (which typically retains predictive power in these analyses) would be further diminished.

Finally, learning promotes social mobility. The research cited earlier on intergenerational social mobility in the United States also investigated which educational mechanisms were responsible. One can-didate is school quality based on inputs, such as school spending and class size, and these measures did have some predictive power. But learning outcomes turn out to be especially important: the test scores of the community in which a child lives (adjusted for the income of that community) are among the strongest predictors of social mobility later in life.

The literature on the benefits of learning is still growing, with much more research needed. But both common sense and the emerging research literature make it clear that if investigators care about the benefits of education, they should focus on whether students are learning—not just on how well schools are equipped or even how long students stay in school. Part II of this Report takes up this issue.

*Full Chapter is compiled in your Book of Readings. Learning to Realize Education's Promise p.30-40

*Full report can be accessed here: https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018

Consider these graphics that differentiate what a principal does in SCHOOLING and LEARNING.

Why do you think the World Bank point out the difference between SCHOOLING and LEARNING? Doesn't schooling automatically lead to learning?