Interest in scaling promising innovations to effect systemic change in education around the world has grown over the last decade. The work of scaling education innovations (up, out, down, and into deep and lasting impact) has always required nimble attention to the unpredictability of implementation. Much has been written about the need for…

Latin American countries have evolved over the years. Still, after years of military reign, socioeconomicinstability, and civil wars, the region has been known for its anti-hegemonic economic growth (educationalpolicies) strategies. Central and South America's educational system has long been under investigation by researchers both theoretically…

The PISA for Development (PISA-D) project aims to make PISA more accessible and relevant to middle- and low-income countries by introducing new features to the assessment, including tests that are specially designed to measure lower levels of performance, contextual questionnaires that better reflect the situations of 15-year-olds across a diverse…

Building on the experience of working with middle-income countries in PISA since 2000, and in an effort to respond to the emerging demand for PISA to cater to a wider range of countries, the OECD launched the PISA for Development (PISA-D) initiative in 2014. This one-off pilot project, spanning six years, aims to make the assessment more…

We can expect climate change to alter the frequency, magnitude, timing, and location of many natural hazards. For example, heat waves are likely to become more frequent, and heavy downpours and flooding more common and more intense. Hurricanes will likely grow more dangerous, rising sea levels will mean more coastal flooding, and more-frequent and…

In 1960, in developing nations, less than half of primary-school-age children were enrolled in school. By the early 1990s, despite rapid population increases in much of the world, the proportion was more than 75%. In most developing countries, education has been largely synonymous with schooling but not entirely. Formal schools have been widely…

This paper looks at several dimensions of the grade failure issue in Honduras using a unique data set compiled by the UMCE evaluation project in 1998 and 1999. The analytical framework incorporates econometric analysis of standardized tests and teacher pass/fail decisions for roughly 13,000 second and fourth grade students. The results show that…

Interactive radio instruction has gained attention as a low-cost means of improving the academic achievement of primary school students. The Radio Mathematics Project in Nicaragua and subsequent programs developed by the Learning Technologies for Basic Education (LearnTech) Project illustrate the evolution such programs have undergone as…