Is Escuela Nueva a Solution for Educating Conflict-Affected Children?

Abstract

Background Quality education is essential for creating sustainable development for low and middle-income countries. For some of these countries, one of the greatest challenges to providing quality education is that they are in the midst of violent, armed civil conflict. Colombia is a middle-income country that underwent the longest civil conflict in the Western Hemisphere. It began in the 1950s and officially ended in 2016, though there have still been some small outbreaks of violence. The variation in intensity of the conflict in Colombia makes it possible to explore how exposure to violence affects student learning, and thus learn how to better serve the needs of these students.

Objectives This thesis analyzed how varying exposure to outbreaks of the conflict affected primary school student learning in Colombia. It also explored how a pedagogy for primary school called Escuela Nueva (EN) performed in violent conflict areas. Previous research has already established that EN pedagogy improves student learning, but this study analyzed whether that remained the case when students were exposed to violent conflict. I hypothesized that violent conflict would negatively affect student learning, conflict-affected EN students would outperform conflict-affected students at traditional schools, and that the margin of difference between EN and traditional schools in violent conflict municipalities would be greater than the margin of difference between the two in relatively peaceful municipalities.

Methods This study relied on a typology of the intensity and frequency of violent conflict in each municipality in Colombia, created by the Conflict Analysis Resource Center (CERAC); plausible values generated from the results of a national test, administered by the Colombian Ministry of Education to every third and fifth grader, as a proxy for student learning; and data from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) on school characteristics, most importantly whether a primary school was classified as EN.

Results I found that the greater the exposure to violent conflict, the worse students performed on the exam–up to nearly a fifth of a standard deviation for those most affected. EN did generally significantly improve student learning for conflict-affected students, but not by a larger margin than it did in relatively peaceful municipalities.

Conclusions The findings indicate that more investment needs to be allocated to those students who are the most affected by violent conflict, if they are to continue learning in school. They also suggest that EN pedagogy ought to be considered a strong option for educating primary school age students in areas of violent conflict.