Abstract

Over the past decades, the educational scene in developing countries like India and Nepal has changed significantly. There's been a notable increase in enrolment rates, incorporating more socially disadvantaged students into the education system. This progress promotes equal access to education but also poses challenges to equity and quality. Research shows that students from low socio-economic backgrounds face academic struggles. However, resilient students achieve academic success despite challenging circumstances. Investigating their experiences enhances our understanding of factors impacting socially disadvantaged groups. This study focuses on Mumbai and Kathmandu, exploring factors associated with exceptional academic performance despite socio-economic disadvantages (academic resilience). We aim to gain insights informing policies and interventions for supporting disadvantaged students and promoting educational excellence for all. OBJECTIVES: 1. To identify the extent to which the variation in the likelihood of being academically resilient in Mumbai and Kathmandu is associated with individual or institutional characteristics. 2. To identify the school factors (particularly models or accountability processes) most consistently associated with academic resilience in Mumbai and Kathmandu. LITERATURE REVIEW: Based on our review of existing literature on accountability and learning outcomes in socioeconomically disadvantaged settings, several key findings emerge: 1. Previous research indicates a positive association between certain forms of accountability and improved learning outcomes in socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts (Shields et al., 2021). 2. The conventional understanding of accountability often revolves around the school being answerable to parents. However, a more sophisticated approach should encompass mutual accountability among multiple stakeholders, including parents' accountability to the school and the school's accountability to its teachers. This involves embracing concepts like parental voice and vertical/horizontal accountability within schools. 3. Educational outcomes are often narrowly defined, with little consideration of how accountability is linked to defining and achieving these outcomes. It is essential to establish shared standards and goals as part of the accountability process to avoid taking outcomes like test scores and teacher attendance for granted (Rasche and Esser, 2006). 4. For a comprehensive understanding of accountability and achievement in societal terms, measurement methodologies must account for social impact. Techniques like social return on investment (Scholten et al., 2006) and blended value accounting (Nicholls, 2009) provide valuable tools for assessing social value creation in marginalised contexts. Given these insights, we see a clear need for more nuanced research that explores the dynamics of accountability among multiple stakeholders in education, its influence on student learning outcomes, and the ways in which these factors contribute to social value for families and communities facing various challenges related to class, caste, gender, and socioeconomic deprivation. This paper aims to address this research gap by examining the relationship between students' academic resilience (measured as the likelihood of students performing above expected levels, when in a socioeconomically disadvantaged context), stakeholders' perceptions of accountability, and the creation of social value through enhanced social inclusion and psychosocial well-being for these students. METHODS: Data was collected through (1) a survey on perceived accountability administered to parents, teachers, headteachers and (4th grade) students, and (2) an assessment of learning outcomes, psychosocial well-being, and social inclusion in the classroom. Accountability survey data were paired with students’ learning outcomes data via an anonymous code distributed with exam booklets. The resulting dataset combines students’ learning outcomes and well-being (IRT scores); stakeholders’ perceived accountability and demographic backgrounds; and school management and funding models. The study drew upon a sample of 30 schools in each country, which yielded 27 participating schools in India and 30 in Nepal, with 5,448 respondents in total (3,602 students, 1,591 parents, 195 teachers, and 57 headteachers). While many variables are measured directly on the questionnaire (e.g., age, caste, gender), others were scaled from several items. Learning outcome scores were scaled using a Rasch model (Rasch, 1960), and an index of socioeconomic status was created from a principal component analysis of parents’ income, education, and household assets. Finally, questions on accountability were scaled using confirmatory factor analysis to create measures of four key constructs: - Exit: Parents’ belief that changing schools is an option or a legitimate response to problems within the school (4 items). - Voice: Parents’ belief that they can represent their views and make changes within the school (5 items). - Vertical Accountability: Teachers accounting for their performance or following the directives from a hierarchical authority (3 Items). - Horizontal Accountability: Teachers lateral accounting for their performance to other teachers, including sharing practice and peer observation (6 items). - Academic resilience: students who achieve one standard deviation above the predicted score, when considering their individual SES, and are at or below the 25th percentile of the SES distribution. Once the analysis variables were defined, we fit a multilevel logistic regression model to explore the relationship between our key constructs and the likelihood of being academically resilient. RESULTS: Preliminary results suggest that, in line with previous research, the variation in the likelihood of being academically resilient is concentrated in the individual rather than at the school level. Our analyses also provide mixed evidence on the relationship between accountability and the likelihood of being academically resilient. Certain types of accountability (i.e., voice and vertical accountability) appear effective in Mumbai, but not in Kathmandu. CONCLUSION: The fact that most of the variation in the likelihood of being resilient is concentrated at the individual level, indicated that the margin for improvement through school-level factors such as accountability is limited, particularly when less changeable factors such as the school's socioeconomic composition are considered. Thus, in these contexts, a more viable approach to improving learning may be through policies that work beyond schools and find innovative ways to support individual students. Our study inevitably suffers from limitations that should be considered in interpreting our results. Most notably, a cross-sectional design could be critiqued as a poor way to assess the value added by different types of accountability. Furthermore, our sample, particularly at the school level, may not have the statistical power to reliably identify some relationships between variables, particularly if they are rather weak in relation to variance in the data.