Measurement innovations

At the GC-DWC, we undertake applied research that is focused on utility, feasibility, and rigor. Utility, at its core, deals with whether or not the research will be useful to make reasonable decisions about the activity, intervention, strategy, or program being implemented. Data about children’s learning and development needs to have a practical goal that allows practitioners and policy makers to learn about how their program affects children and what changes they can make to programming to improve children and adolescents’ development.

Feasibility deals with the actual process of conducting research in low-resource and crisis contexts; it asks whether the process is doable given the logistical, operational, and systematic limitations that are in place. Rigor deals with not only the validity and reliability of the research being conducted but also whether the thresholds of rigorous research are actually viable for practitioners and researchers working in low-resource, crisis-affected, and fragile contexts. Our team partners with practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers in various low-resource and crisis contexts to ensure that the research does not only add to the global evidence base about what works to address whole child development but also is usable, feasible, and rigorous for our partners in making programmatic and policy decisions. 

To do this, the GC-DWC utilizes a number of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research approaches during the development, pilot, proof-of-concept, and scale-up phase of programs focused on child development and learning. Below is a description of a selection of methods that we use. 

Resilience

Specific to education, the term resilience refers to the capacity of a child to cope with, or successfully adapt to acute and/or chronic adversity that is seen as a major threat to their educational development. Resilience, in other words, is about students achieving educational outcomes despite experiencing life-threatening experiences or being chronically exposed to negative living circumstances. Resilience is not a static characteristic of a child, however, but instead refers to the nature of the relationship between a child and the social and physical environment. A child who shows resilience in one context at one time may not show the same resilience in another context or at another time.

Education and resilience have a strong reciprocal relationship: participation in education promotes children's resilience, and resilient children are more likely to participate in and benefit from education. Strong cognitive competencies, such as problem-solving abilities, are key components of resilience that are strengthened by quality education. Conversely, children’s social and emotional competence informs what and how much children are able to learn in education settings as well as their risks of low performance and dropping out of school. 

At the center, we focus on addressing children’s academic resilience by focusing on three building blocks:

1. Basic needs: Core requirements for children’s healthy development include appropriate housing, nutritious food, clean water, personal hygiene, health care and physical safety and security. These are the universal survival needs of children.  Students can only focus on higher-order tasks such as learning when their basic needs are met.

2. Nurturing relationships: Children develop, grow and thrive through relationships. As Luthar (2006) suggests, “resilience rests, fundamentally, on relationships. The desire to belong is a basic human need, and positive connections with others lie at the very core of psychological development; strong, supportive relationships are critical for achieving and sustaining resilient adaptation” (p. 780).

3. Core capabilities and competencies: It is widely recognized that children’s ability to succeed in school is not limited to their knowledge of content or their academic skills. Research suggests that children’s ability to learn and succeed in educational settings is also contingent on their ability to understand and manage emotions, feel and show empathy for others, and establish and maintain positive relationships--their social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL acknowledges that learning is a social process, and schools are social environments where social emotional competencies are important for students to be able to manage interactions with peers and teachers and manage their emotions to facilitate and not hinder their own learning.

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About Practical Measurement

The current discourse around measurement and evaluation of children’s learning and development has moved the sector away from reliance on anecdotal information to a focus on capturing the actual change in outcomes for children in specific programs or interventions. While there has been significant attention on the rigor of measurement, limited focus has been placed on ensuring that measurement of children’s learning and development is appropriate and feasible for practitioners in low-income and fragile contexts. Through the programs supported by the center, we focus on practical measurement: measurement that is driven-by and focused on the needs of practitioners working with limited time and resources in low- resource and fragile contexts. 

In the context of measuring children’s learning and development in low-resource and fragile contexts, there are four fundamental parameters that drive practical measurement. 

1. Appropriateness deals with what is being measured and how it is defined. In WCD, social and emotional learning (SEL) skills are the focus of research for a majority of partners. However, SEL differs from literacy or numeracy because it mainly concerns how people manage their emotions, perceive themselves and engage with others, rather than indicating their raw ability to process information. SEL measurement requires a deliberate and continuous effort to understand and respond to diverse experiences, cultural norms and common purposes and pursuits.

2. Utility, at its core, deals with whether or not the data that you collect will be useful for you to make reasonable decisions about the activity, intervention, or strategy (heretofore referred to as program) being implemented. Data about children’s learning and development needs to have a practical goal that allows users to learn about how their program affects children and what changes they can make in their programs to improve children’s learning and/or development.

3. Feasibility deals with the actual process of measuring learning or development outcomes for children in low-income or fragile contexts and whether this process is doable given the logistical, operational, and systematic limitations that are in place.

4. Rigor, in the context of practice measurement, deals with not only the level to which the measure provides information that is both valid and reliable but also whether the thresholds of rigorous measurement and research are actually viable for practitioners and researchers working in low-income and fragile contexts.

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