Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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and how that across all levels, urban schools are outperforming rural schools
in 2011 but urban/rural inequities have decreased between 1999 and 2011. In terms of gender,
overall girls tend to outperform boys. The disparity is not noticeable at level 4, however it is
significant in lower levels and peaks at level 1. This disparity between boys and girls’ performance
at level 1 has only increased between 1999 and 2011, for both Mathematics and Sciences.
Students in the lowest wealth quintile (quintile 1) are consistently performing significantly worse
than other quintiles, especially when compared to students in quintile 5.
ooms in on level 1 performance in mathematics. It shows that overall, the performance
in mathematics has gotten worse between 1999 and 2011 at level 1. This worsening trend is
largest for boys, in urban centres and for the lowest two quintiles (with a small decrease in
quintile 5 performance). These results may be due to several inter-related issues. For example,
the worsening trends in urban versus rural areas could be due to the larger incentives for child
labour since opportunities are more abundant in urban centres. The decreasing performance of
the poorest students could be due to the government focus on access between the years 1999 and
2011, which came at the expense of quality. This is a common phenomenon in many countries
whereby increasing access is achieved by lowering the qualifications needed to become a teacher
in order to increase the supply of teachers and by building more schools or renting more spaces
but with less attention to the quality of the learning environment. With high numbers of teachers
with weak qualifications and high pupil to teacher ratios (see section 3.2 and 3.3), Jordan seems
to be suffering from this trend, which would explain the worsening of students’ performance in
mathematics level 1.
Table 17 Achievement in TIMSS Science by background characteristics for 8th grade students
in Jordan, 1999 and 2011
Science
Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4
1999 2011 1999 2011 1999 2011 1999 2011
Location Rural 59.5 69.6 32.6 41.1 10.2 11.8 0.8 1.3
Urban 72.7 73.5 44.8 48.3 17.3 16 3.4 1.9
Asset
quintiles Quint 1 62.7 62.4 32.8 29.2 10.4 5.4 0.8 0.1
Quint 2 72.5 71.4 41.6 40.6 13 10.9 2.8 1.2
Quint 3 70.5 76.5 42.9 48.1 13.6 11.9 2.3 1.6
Quint 4 78.2 83.8 50.9 61.1 20.5 22.2 2.8 1.9
Quint 5 86.8 85.9 64.4 66.7 31.8 27 7.4 3.8
Gender Female 73.3 80.7 44.1 52.4 15.9 16.2 3.1 2
Male 65.9 62.8 39.4 38 15 12 2.3 1.1
Total Total 69.1 71.5 41.5 45 15.4 14 2.7 1.5
Source: UNESCO WIDE Database