Peer-reviewed article
Learning poverty in Pakistan: examining the influence of teacher quality, household socioeconomic conditions, and school resources on student learning outcomes
Nimra Jamil, Zehra Sadiq Ali Amwani, Syeda Munazza Shahid, Amanullah Tunio, Mehreen Taj et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view ·Key points
Limitations
Abstract
Learning poverty is a significant problem in the education system in Pakistan as children are not able to learn fundamental reading and numeracy skills even after going to school. We investigated in this study how learning outcomes were associated with teacher quality, socioeconomic conditions in the household and resources available at the school for 400 grade 11-12 students from public schools in Karachi East, Hyderabad and Sukkur, Sindh. A cross sectional quantitative explanatory design was used. Data were gathered using a structured questionnaire, criterion-referenced reading-comprehension and numeracy tests. Those students who were not reading at or above the prespecified benchmark rate of 60% had been identified as being in a position of learning poverty. Descriptive statistics, Welch's t tests, chi-square tests, Pearson's correlation and binary logistic regression were used with age and sex as controls and district as sensitivity factor. 56.8% of students in the synthetic dataset did not meet the reading benchmark. Higher teacher quality (AOR = 0.38, 95% CI [0.26, 0.56]), better household socioeconomic conditions (AOR = 0.64, 95% CI [0.52, 0.80]), and greater school resources (AOR = 0.44, 95% CI [0.30, 0.64]) were associated with lower odds of learning poverty. These associations did not change post district adjustment but neither age or sex were statistically significant.