Student Engagement and Attendance Are Central Mechanisms Interacting With Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education: Evidence From Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2018–2020

We conducted two rounds of one day long group model building workshops – between October 2018 and April 2019 (n=323) and between November 2019 and July 2020 (n=325) respectively – in 40 schools of Badakhshan, Ghazni and Takhar provinces of Afghanistan and 59 schools of Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. Group model building is a set of Community Based System Dynamics (CBSD) methods that provides a structured process and forum for stakeholders to identify and prioritize issues through the language of systems. We conducted four distinct activities: (i) focus group discussions (FGDs) to define a shared vision of inclusive and equitable quality education; (ii) variable elicitation to identify multiple factors perceived to influence inclusive and equitable quality education; (iii) connections circle to establish perceived connections between identified factors and identify causal feedback loops and, (iv) action ideas elicitation for participants to agree on interventions to affect the system. Trained facilitators assisted school stakeholders in the process. Visual causal maps were elaborated by children, parents, teachers and school management committees. During each workshop, several iterations of the model with ongoing discussion of connections between factors were elaborated before a final visualization was agreed upon by the group. The building of the CLD and its review allows researchers to gauge each group of participants’ consensus vision of the system. After the conclusion of the workshops, facilitators reproduced the final Causal Loop Diagram models using Vensim® PLE software. We used techniques from multivariate analysis of ecological communities to compare identify features commonly perceived to be central to a successfully inclusive and equitable education system. These methods, which have been previously applied beyond ecology, allowed us to compare CLDs by i) quantifying distance/similarity measures between them based on number of shared components, ii) distinguishing clusters of CLDs that are more similar to one another, and iii) aggregating across clusters to identify the common components shared by all. These multivariate analyses also allowed us to test which school, teacher or student characteristics correlate with differences among CLDs. To do this, we ordered CLDs built by each group using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling on Euclidian distance matrices of causal feedback loops expressed by each CLD using the R package vegan. We then projected the CLDs into an ordination space in which their distance from one another was defined by the difference of their causal links. Thus, CLDs that shared a great number of causal links were plotted close together; those that differed in causal links were plotted farther apart. Finally, we tested how well the resulting distribution of CLDs in the ordination space was explained by five sets of characteristics of the groups who built them. First, we considered role in the educational system (children, teachers, school management committee members, parents). Second, the sex balance of the model-building group was considered, which we quantified as the percentage of participants identifying as male, or, for the sake of characterizing groups, a binning of this variable into models built by groups >80% female, >80% male, or mixed. Third, geography was examined at three nested levels: the 99 schools, eight administrative areas (within Afghanistan the provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar and Ghazni and the distinct district of Jaighori within Ghazni; within Pakistan the districts of Bahawalnagar, Rahim Yar Khan and Vehari in Punjab province and Gothki in Sindh province), and two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Fourth, wealth was measured by two alternative indices with scores calculated using polychoric principal component analysis [57]. One characterized common durable goods: radios, mobile phones, TV sets, pressure cookers, lamps, refrigerators, generator/solar panels, sewing machines, bicycles, motorbikes/auto-rickshaws, cars, houses. The other characterized rural wealth: animals, i.e. camels, cows and buffalos, sheeps and goats and poultry. Each index was divided into three categories (lowest 20%/ middle 20-80%/ highest 20%). Fifth, time period, which captured the difference between workshops conducted before and workshops conducted after an intervention composed of an intensive two week inclusive education training and the implementations of three to five action ideas identified and selected by participants. Action ideas could include construction of infrastructure (such as classrooms, playground, restrooms, boundary walls, library), classroom material (chairs, tables, books) or procedures (regular parent-teacher meetings, classroom regulations, teacher and students’ attitudes).