Data Must Speak: Exploring Innovative Methods and Approaches in Education Research
Around 70 per cent of students in low- and middle-income countries grapple with learning poverty, unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. Yet even in the most challenging educational contexts, some schools outperform others located in similar contexts and with similar resources. How do these exceptional schools, known as ‘positive deviant’ schools, achieve improved outcomes in learning, retention, equity and gender equality?Data Must Speak (DMS) – a global initiative implemented since 2014 – aims to address the evidence gaps to mitigate the learning crisis using existing data. The DMS positive deviance research component is co-created with ministries of education and national education actors. It relies on mixed methods to generate knowledge, alongside practical lessons for national policymakers and the broader international education community about ‘what works’, ‘why’ and ‘how to’ scale grassroots solutions to address the learning crisis.The research utilizes innovative and complementary approaches of positive deviance, behavioural sciences, implementation research and scaling science to identify and scale up behaviours and practices of these positive deviant schools. On this page, you will find the DMS Methodological Review, which presents key definitions, concepts and methodologies of these approaches to guide and inform the development and implementation of the DMS research at country level. Additionally, a series of briefs takes these methodologies and discusses how they have been applied in the DMS research, offering perspective on how they could be used more broadly in the education sector.
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Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight
