The quality of secondary education in the Middle East and North Africa: what can we learn from TIMSS’ results?

Research on educational quality has been scarce in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, whereas the debates over educational quality date from 1966 in the USA with the Coleman Report. Fortunately TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) starts to fill this gap by providing data on students’ achievement and for many MENA countries this is the first time that such data are available. The paper gives an overview of the quality of education in MENA using TIMSS’ 2007 data. The research questions addressed here are why is achievement low? And why is the gap between the top‐performing countries and MENA countries large? In order to answer these questions, the paper focuses on several aspects: the first is the inefficiency of acquiring the language, the second is the inefficiency of time devoted to homework, the third is the meagre intended curriculum which is translated into a weaker implemented curriculum, the fourth aspect deals with the inefficiency of public resources devoted to the education sector. Finally, the paper highlights two other factors believed to affect students’ achievement: family background and students’ attitudes towards mathematics and science.     

Introducing a scalable peer feedback system for learning teams

In the current research, we report on a peer feedback system for supporting student teamwork skill development during post-secondary education. The peer feedback system is part of a larger suite of assessments at ITPmetrics.com. This is a free assessment-based system that allows team members to provide round-robin ratings of each member’s effectiveness in the team on five dimensions (communication; commitment; foundation of knowledge, skills and abilities; emphasising high standards; and focus), as well as provide anonymous written feedback to supplement the numeric scores. Team members have access to a dashboard where they can complete the assessment and store assessment reports generated from their peers’ ratings. We summarise data from student learning teams suggesting that peer ratings are reliable (internally consistent, unidimensional and inter-rater correlated; n?>?85,000). Recommendations for implementation are provided with respect to pre-briefing, debriefing, and assessment schedules.