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activities is to conduct formal evaluations. World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education
Results (SABER) study shows that the majority of the 26 low and middle income countries
examined employ some form of teacher evaluation. This includes 14 OIC member states -- Cote
d Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Lebanon,
Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza and, Yemen (WB 2017a). Regular
assessment of students is equally important to hold schools accountable. However, there is
considerable variation within the OIC in terms of effectiveness and frequency of national
assessment. In some member countries (e.g. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan), students sit for
three-four high-stake public examinations at primary and secondary grades before tertiary
education. In others (e.g. Jordan), there is only one pre-tertiary high stake national assessment.
This has created additional challenges in countries with poor administrative capacity (e.g.
Bangladesh) where test papers are regularly leaked in advance and sold to students. The
absence of international scrutiny of schools muffles debate on education quality.
Over the past two decades, therefore, developing country governments and development
partners have developed and implemented a range of education interventions to address the
ongoing learning crisis. While the crisis is caused by amultitude of factors, existing interventions
prioritize a specific input or problem area and directly focus on either children or the behavior
or preference of households, teachers, schools and systems. As the global evidence has
expanded, it is possible to learn from the existing interventions to identify reforms that are
effective in improving learning outcomes. Globally thousands of studies have been conducted to
examine the causal impact of interventions. Most observational studies suffer from various well-
known methodological limitations. They differ in terms of measurement, sample size and
controls for confounding factors all of which affect comparability of the evidence. It is also
difficult to generalize the effectiveness of an input in boosting learning, based on simple
correlations between inputs and outcomes. While improving school quality is found to raise test
scores (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2011), the exact aspect of school and teacher quality
is difficult to locate (Azam and Kingdon, 2015). There is therefore a shift in preference in favor
of randomized control trial (RCTs) evaluation of educational interventions. However, education
related RCTs are rare for OIC countries. Moreover, the distribution of impact studies is uneven
across different areas of educational development. Some interventions (e.g. cash transfers,
structured pedagogy and computer-assisted learning) have been studied more frequently while
the evidence on some other interventions (e.g. school-based health, information to children,
remedial education and school day extension) is more limited (3IE 2016).
In this section, a brief overview of the available evidence is presented based on the existing
international publications on education quality and factors and initiatives that work to improve
school quality. While there is no single solution to fix the quality of education, this section also
highlights some good practices within the OIC. In OIC member countries in central Asia such as
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, various national strategies
to raise education quality produced mixed results (Chapman, Weidman, Cohen, and Mercer
2005). One country that particularly stands out in terms of innovations in the field of education
is Malaysia, also home to arguably the largest education export zone in the world (Sabel and
Jordan 2015). The government responded to poor performance in earlier round of PISA by
introducing reforms which has helped improve student performance in PISA 2015. Malaysia
therefore offers a number of good practices which we highlight while noting that these are not
necessarily transferable as the underlying preconditions differ across OIC countries.