System (In)Coherence: Quantifying the Alignment of Primary Education Curriculum Standards, Examinations, and Instruction
in Two East African Countries
Abstract
Improvements in instructional coherence have been shown to have large impacts on student learning, yet analysis of such coherence, especially in developing countries and at a systems level, is rare. We use an established methodology, the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), and apply it to a developing country context to systematically analyze and quantify the content and coherence of the primary curriculum standards, national examinations, and actual teaching delivered in the classroom in Uganda and Tanzania. We find high levels of incoherence across all three instructional components. Rather than aligning with either the curriculum standards or exams, teachers’ classroom instruction is poorly aligned with both. Teachers tend to cover broad swathes of content and levels of cognitive demand, unrelated to the structure of either the curriculum standards or exams. An exception is Uganda mathematics, for which standards, exams, and teacher instruction are all well aligned. By shedding light on alignment deficits in the two countries, these results draw attention to a policy area that has previously attracted little (if any) attention in many developing countries’ education policy reform efforts. In addition to providing empirical results for Uganda and Tanzania, this study provides a proof-of-concept for the use of the SEC methodology as a diagnostic tool in developing countries, helping education systems identify areas of instructional (in)coherence and informing efforts to improve coherence for learning.
This work is part of the ‘Research on Improving Systems of Education’ (RISE) programme
Citation
Atuhurra, J. and Kaffenberger, M. 2020. System (In)Coherence: Quantifying the Alignment of Primary Education Curriculum Standards, Examinations, and Instruction in Two East African Countries. RISE Working Paper Series. 20/057. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2020/057