Zambia faces many challenges common to low- and middle-income countries as it seeks to improve its education system, including low literacy rates for young Zambians and low public expenditure on education. In the past 20 years, Zambia's school system has expanded to reach more children in rural areas, primarily through community schools, which are…

In the drive to achieve universal primary education as one of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing recognition of the urgency of focusing on teacher education to both meet the demand for more than one million qualified teachers required to achieve this goal within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to combat the sometimes poor…

This study investigates inter-school variations in several dimensions of opportunity to learn as well as examines the extent to which these measures significantly affect students' performance on grade 7 literacy and numeracy exams. After situating the study within the global discourse emphasizing the importance of providing access to quality…

Charles Lockett is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at James Madison University, where he teaches developmental psychology as well as advanced topic courses in cultural psychology and the psychology of race and racism. A graduate of Howard University, Lockett credits Howard's Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship Program for his…

A study conducted in 1988 assessed the effectiveness of the multigrade system in providing a primary education at four pilot schools in sparsely populated, rural areas of Zambia. In an attempt to alleviate the problems of financial strain and low enrollment in rural schools, this system combines two or more grade levels into one class taught by…