The impact of structured teaching methods on the quality of education in Brazil

This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education for students in primary public school in Brazil. Structured methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied in the educational system. In recent years, several municipalities in the state of São Paulo have contracted out private educational providers to implement these structured methods in their schooling systems. Their pedagogical proposal involves structuring of curriculum content, development of teacher and student textbooks, and the training and supervision of teachers and instructors. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we find that the 4th- and 8th-grade students in the municipalities with structured methods performed better in Portuguese and mathematics than did students in municipalities not exposed to these methods. We find no differences in passing rates. A robustness test supports the assumption that there is no unobserved municipal characteristics associated with proficiency changes over time that may affect the results.     

“How do You Know this Answer?” – Children’s Use of Text Data and General Knowledge in Story Comprehension

This study investigates how, and to what extent, young readers (7–8 year-olds) use text information or their prior knowledge when answering comprehension questions about narrative texts. The children were asked to explain how they found out their responses by answering the following question: “how do you know this answer?” Their answers and justifications were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The text proved to be the main source of information for these readers. However, sometimes the children seemed to ignore the text and over rely on their prior knowledge to answer the questions. The procedure of asking children to justify their answers was shown to be a good way of specifying more precisely some of their problems in text comprehension. It also seemed to encourage them to look back at the text and review their responses and, as such, it could be considered a useful tool to improve children’s reading comprehension.