Evidence based practice in girls’ education in Cambodia: Lessons from work in progress
| Authors | Type | Stream | Full Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ron Peter Watt | Open call | Quality |  en |
Since 2002 CARE Cambodia has worked in the remote north east province of Ratanakiri in a program known as the Highland Communities Program. The education component of that program is called the Highland Community Education Project (HCEP). The primary objective of HCEP was “to address the education needs of disadvantaged indigenous children, especially girls, through the establishment of 6 community bilingual schools targeting girls and boys who have never enrolled or who have dropped out of the formal system”. While bilingual education has been shown to advantage all children from linguistic minority groups, there is a body of literature that concludes that girls are advantaged more so than boys.
The 6 original HCEP schools were all in villages that had never had schools before. As a result of the work of HCEP, MoEYS is now replicating this model of bilingual education to MoEYS community state schools, not only in Ratanakiri, but also in two other provinces in the north east, Mondulkiri and Stung Treng.
This presentation will focus on an offshoot project from HCEP, known as Bending Bamboo. There will be a discussion of the setting up of an operational research agenda that was a response to an extensive situational analysis. There will be a discussion of the evidence based practices of CARE Cambodia as the organisation seeks to document the efficacy of its bilingual education intervention. Student performance in bilingual classrooms was compared with that of students in conventional government schools where the language of instruction is only Khmer, the national language.
The aim of the research is to test the hypothesis that ethnic minority children who receive a bilingual education in their home language or ‘mother language’ and the national language in the early grades, grades 1 to 3, learn the national language, Khmer – literacy and oracy, and mathematics, better than ethnic minority children whose education is in the national language only.
This research project is a longitudinal panel study with the research being carried out over 4 years, from 2009 to 2012. The sample group, 50% of whom are girls, are tested in mathematics, oral Khmer and Khmer literacy. A continuous interval panel method is used, whose members complete data collection activities at one period each year over four years. The quantitative data source are ethnic minority students who speak Kreung or Tampuen as their first language and attend Bending Bamboo bilingual schools (n=50); ethnic minority students who attend HCEP bilingual schools (n=50) and ethnic minority students who speak Kreung or Tampuen as their first language and attend state schools where Khmer language is used as the sole language of instruction (n=50). The students are in their early school years (Grade 1 in 2009). Assessing the students in Khmer literacy component starts when students are in grade 2 in 2010. This is because students in the bilingual schools do not start to learn to read Khmer until grade 2. In grade 1 they their literacy program is in their mother tongue only.
The presentation will discuss a number of limitations when conducting research in the Cambodian context, including the challenges that come with working in remote areas, staff capacity issues, translations and a multi lingual context, and conducting a longitudinal study in a context where the majority of state schools are incomplete and rarely offer more than grade 1 and 2. There will be a discussion of the many contradictions and dilemmas that were built into the research design.
The presentation is of a work in progress. While the first round of data collection for the mathematics and the oral Khmer test are complete, no data analysis has been carried out to date.
About the presenter:
Ron Watt worked in indigenous education in remote communities in the Northern Territory of Australia for more than 20 years. For 8 of those years he was the Head of the School of Education at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. This institute specialised in the training of indigenous teachers for remote communities, many of them with bilingual schools. He has been involved with the HCEP project in Cambodia since its inception in 2002. He is responsible for the oversight of the education and research components of the program.
