Measurement, Systems, and Scaling Initiative

The ability to deliver high-quality education services at scale in crisis contexts is, in part, predicated on the capacity of education systems to collect, analyze, and use high-quality data about children’s holistic learning outcomes and education quality. Yet national, regional, and global architecture for strengthening holistic outcome measurement systems is often fragmented — particularly in contexts of displacement and crisis.

The Measurement, Systems, and Scaling initiative focuses specifically on supporting stakeholders working at — or working to move to — regional, national, or subnational scale in contexts of displacement. The ultimate vision for this work is to improve coherence in education systems in crisis contexts for holistic learning outcomes within and between foundational education frameworks, curricula, and standards, as well as the assessments used to evaluate progress towards those goals. We also aim to facilitate alignment within and between diverse stakeholders, including NGOs, ministries, communities, and donors.

To contribute to such a vision, Global TIES for Children and our partners aim to:

1. Increase the capacity of research-practice-policy partnerships to develop, adapt, test, and use data from holistic learning measures at national and/or sub-national scale.

2. Coordinate with sub-national, national, and/or regional stakeholders to assess and improve alignment between foundational frameworks, curricula, and assessments.

3. Develop and disseminate public goods to support stakeholders’ capacity to generate and use actionable data. These public goods include measures of holistic learning, learning modules, open-source R packages, and more.

Psychometrically sound (reliable), contextually-appropriate (valid), open-access measures linked to culturally and contextually relevant frameworks.

Assessments of children’s holistic learning outcomes — as well as the home, school, and community factors that shape such outcomes — that meet rigorous psychometric criteria and are adaptable and scalable within national and subnational monitoring systems are critical to solving the global learning crisis. But how such outcomes and contextual factors are particularly manifest, valued, and prioritized depends on the context and culture, which in emergency contexts can be particularly complex and politicized.

Ensuring meaningful and accurate data and uptake, then, requires foundational and contextually appropriate conceptual frameworks developed with stakeholder engagement. Such frameworks must link to items, tasks, and approaches to measurement that can easily be adapted. Also required are data systems, infrastructure, and methods that enable stakeholders to find, assess, and track highly mobile populations over time and with limited resources. Finally, in order to ensure that data is ultimately used for decision-making in a way that promotes inclusivity and equity, such measures and systems — as well as accompanying training, guidance, contextualization, and data analytic software and materials — must be fit to purpose and context: open-source and easily usable.

Long-term, sustained partnerships and networks

We have learned that a measure in and of itself is necessary but not sufficient to produce useful, usable, and meaningful data that can inform program and policy decision-making. Required from the outset of any measure development effort are multi-year research-practice-policy partnerships. Such partnerships require years of intensive relationship building to build the trust and skills necessary for uptake of measures and evidence. We have promising evidence that such a collaborative, mutual capacity-building model ensures that the purpose and content of the assessment is relevant to and driven by country stakeholders, increases capacity for and engagement in the use of data and evidence, and supports greater coherence within education systems.