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The World Bank's focus on foundational skills requires that issues of language and Language of Instruction be brought to the forefront of education policy discussions. Poor Language of Instruction policies harm learning, access, equity, cost-effectiveness, and inclusion. Yet nearly 37% of students in low- and middle-income countries are taught in a language they do not understand. Massive learning improvements are feasible by teaching in a small number of additional languages. The World Bank's first Policy Approach Paper on Language of Instruction offers an indication of the work that will be undertaken to support countries in introducing reforms that will result in more resilient, equitable, and effective systems by promoting teaching in the languages that students and teachers speak and understand best. [The report was edited by John Steinhardt.]

The global spread of COVID-19 has led to unprecedented disruptions in schooling around the world that have animated increased interest among policymakers, educators, researchers and the general public in knowing about how education systems have responded to the pandemic and how students' learning experiences have changed. The PISA Global Crises Module was developed to address this need. 62 student questionnaire items (grouped into 11 questions) and 68 school questionnaire items (grouped into 14 questions) were developed following a process that involved input from leading questionnaire development experts, PISA National Centres, as well as small-scale cognitive interview studies in three countries. While all countries were affected by the pandemic in some way, the module seeks to illuminate differential effects on student learning and well-being, and the degree of interruption or changes to education across different education systems. Governing bodies, organisations and researchers can use the instruments and the descriptions of the underlying constructs for adaptation and broader implementation.

This publication is one of two prepared for a South Asian colloquium on issues related to teacher training in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This volume includes four papers presented at the conference. The papers present an analytical view of both policy and practical measures on teacher education. The first paper, "The Professional Development and Training of Teacher Educators" (Elwyn Thomas) examines recruitment, training, and career development in teacher education. The second paper, "Teacher Education: The Quest for Quality" (Motilal Sharma), looks at issues in teacher education in Asia, including World Bank involvement and regional cooperation. The third paper, "A Critique of Policy and Practice in India and Bangladesh" (Adarsh Khanna), analyzes preservice and inservice teacher education in India and Bangladesh, the chief strengths of the Indian and Bangladesh systems, and the importance of aid agency projects. The fourth paper, "Initial Teacher Training in Pakistan" (Haroona Jatoi), explores preservice and inservice teacher training in Pakistan. (Individual papers contains references.) (ND)

"Can You Hear Me? The Right of Young Children to Participate in Decisions Affecting Them" emphasises that participation enhances children's self-esteem and confidence, promotes their overall capacities, produces better outcomes, strengthens understanding of and commitment to democratic processes and protects children more effectively. Participation provides the opportunity for developing a sense of autonomy, independence, heightened social competence and resilience. The benefits are therefore significant, and adults with both direct and indirect responsibility for children need to acquire a greater humility in recognising that they have a great deal to learn from children. But the case for listening to young children goes beyond the beneficial outcomes. It is also a matter of social injustice and human rights. All people, however young, are entitled to be participants in their own lives, to influence what happens to them, to be involved in creating their own environments, to exercise choices and to have their views respected and valued. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

This publication is one of two prepared for a South Asian Colloquium on issues related to teacher training in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The papers in this volume focus on innovations and alternative strategies designed to improve quality in teacher education at preservice phase. The publication is in five sections. The first four sections were prepared by the respective national Ministries of Education. Section 1 is on Bangladesh and includes an overview of literacy and primary education and a discussion of provisions for initial training of teachers, the funding of education, and problems and remedies. Section 2, on India, includes a brief history of India's educational system, a review of key issues in the National Policy of Education, a discussion of issues facing Indian educators in the nineties, and several data tables. Pakistan is the focus of section 3 which looks at historical perspectives on teacher training, training of elementary and secondary teachers, qualifications for teacher educators, innovations in teacher training, analysis of teacher training programs, financing of teacher education, and recommendations for future development. The fourth section is on Sri Lanka and covers inservice and preservice teacher education, successful innovations in teacher training, problems and issues, and statistical information. The final section is an overview by Beatrice Avalos which summarizes the educational context and the characteristics, issues, and alternatives of teacher education in general and in each of the four countries. (Individual sections contain references.) (ND)

The publication recounts two symposiums on Arts Education that took place in Hong Kong and New Delhi, India in January 2004 and March 2005 respectively. Two sections include papers covering the current situation of arts education in Asia and plans for the future. The first part has an introduction to culture and arts education in Asia, the vision and opportunities. It continues with a summary of outcomes from Asia region meetings on arts in education. A case is then made for mainstreaming the arts in Asian education, illustrated by four case studies. The final section discusses influencing policy and actions for reform in various countries in the region. Section two provides a glimpse into the future of arts education. Two papers discuss research on arts education outcomes and an evaluation framework; a further two focus on action plans and initiatives. An annex contains (1) an appeal from UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura for promotion of arts education and creativity at school as part of the construction of a culture of peace; (2) papers presented at the symposia; (3) list of participants; and (4) reference resources. (Contains 7 tables.) [The Asian regional symposium on Arts Education, "Measuring the Impact of Arts in Education," was a cooperative effort between the Office of the UNESCO Regional Advisor for Culture in Asia and the Pacific and the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture (HKICC). The symposium on Arts in Asian Education, "Transmissions and Transformations: Learning through the Arts in Asia," was a joint effort between the Office of the UNESCO Regional Advisor for Culture in Asia and the Pacific, and the India International Centre-Asia Project (IIC-Asia Project).]

This paper reviews research and evaluates information gathered on disabilities and service development in South Asia, especially India and Pakistan. The concept of "community-based rehabilitation" (CBR), which stresses the need for rehabilitation efforts rooted in the context of local cultural concepts, is discussed. The paper emphasizes the necessity of integrating philosophical and anthropological perspectives into disability information development and community-based rehabilitation programs. The paper recommends rehabilitation efforts that incorporate indigenous disability-related practices, such as casual educational integration, and that integrate local concepts of the child, personhood, ability, disability, and relationships. A review of South Asian information resources, especially those concerning mental retardation, suggests the difficulty of developing indigenous knowledge production when Western material is easily accessible. The historical development of some Asian and European community responses to disability is outlined as background for a description of the rise of CBR programs in India and Pakistan during the 1980s. Among issues discussed are CBR training, information technology, program evaluation, and the roles of foreign rehabilitation professionals and aid and development organizations. (Contains 247 references.) (DB)

A country report for South Asian countries including India is presented from publisher BMI, with topics including economic growth, reunification efforts, and political structure.

Education is recognized to be a key factor of economic development, not only giving access to technological progress as emphasized by the Schumpeterian growth theory, but also entailing numerous social externalities such as the demographic transition (Murtin, 2009) or democratization (Murtin and Wacziarg, 2010). If the evolution of world distributions of income and longevity over the last two centuries have been described by Bourguignon and Morrisson (2002), changes in the world distribution of education have remained unexplored until now, despite their major importance. How has global education inequality evolved over the twentieth century? How should it be measured? Up to now, existing studies on education inequality have had limited spatial and time coverage. For example, Castello and Domenech (2002) and Thomas et al. (2001) provide a descriptive analysis of years of schooling inequality for a broad panel of countries, but their study starts only in 1960. Also, they remain at the country level and do not consider the world distribution of years of schooling, which takes into account educational differences both within and between countries. In contrast, this paper depicts the world distribution of education over 140 years, improving and extending the database recently released by Morrisson and Murtin (2009), which focuses on average years of schooling. The authors provide both average years of schooling and the distribution of education as summarised up by four quantiles in each country. Importantly, this new database is cross-validated by historical data on illiteracy rates. Then, they describe average stocks of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling by region since 1870, and estimate world inequality in years of schooling, which has been dramatically reduced since 1870. Focusing on the measurement of education inequality, this paper raises an important methodological issue. The authors show that a substantial share of inequality in years of schooling can be mechanically explained by a single component of the distribution of education, namely the population that has not attended school, subsequently called the illiterate population. Actually, they find that the observed decrease in inequality in years of schooling over the XXth century is almost entirely explained by the decline in illiteracy. They believe that this result, derived both theoretically and empirically, could help to reconsider an empirical fact discussed in the literature on education inequality (see Berthelemy (2006)), namely the cross-country negative correlation between the average of and the inequality in years of schooling. This correlation mainly reflects the negative and mechanical correlation between average schooling and the illiteracy rate. In line with a recent macroeconomic literature (see for instance Hall and Jones (1999)), the authors then turn to human capital as defined by Mincer (1974), in order to confer a monetary dimension to education. They propose estimates of the world inequality in human capital, examining several definitions for human capital. They focus on one functional form in particular, which accounts for the existence of diminishing returns to schooling. It is the only one that can account for the cross-country negative correlation between Mincer returns to schooling and average years of schooling, as described by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2004). At the national level, they find that that human capital inequality within countries has increased then stabilized or even decreased in most regions of the world. When plotted against average years of schooling, human capital inequality within countries has clearly followed an inverted U-shape curve, namely a "Kuznets curve of education". At the global level, they also find that human capital inequality has increased from 1870 to approximatively 1970, then has decreased. They interpret these findings as a consequence of mass education and the existence of diminishing returns to schooling. (Contains 6 tables, 6 figures and 14 footnotes.)

This paper discusses issues related to developments in computer and communication technologies in south Asia. The first section considers the Internet and its impact. Paradigm shifts and globalization are addressed in the second section, including the shifts away from stand alone libraries to library and information networks, ownership to access, just-in-case to just-in-time, print-based publications to digital documents, stand alone libraries to networked systems, intermediary model to end-user model, command-based systems to menu-based systems, linear to non-linear mode of access, hierarchical to non-hierarchical systems, one-way dissemination of information to interactive communication, bundling of scholarly journal to unbundling, stability to instability, physical format to formless data, and top-down to bottom-up systems. The third section examines the existing gaps and inequality between and within developed and developing countries. South Asia and its problems are described in the fourth section, including geographical, socioeconomic, and political factors, as well as steps in the direction of regional cooperation and socioeconomic development such as SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and SAPTA (SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement). The conclusion points out the need to coordinate and consolidate the resources and services of different types of libraries in South Asia and describes some resource sharing programs in the region. Contains 32 references. (MES)

Star TV, the first international satellite broadcast system in Asia, has had a profound effect on national broadcasting systems, most of which are rigidly controlled, state owned monopoly organizations. The purpose of this paper was to study the response of national governments, media industries, and the general public to this multichannel direct broadcast service. India is used as a case study because it is generally representative of Asian national broadcast environments and has been specially targeted as a potential market for Star TV's services. Public response to the service has been enthusiastic. Industry has mainly viewed it as a short-term, money-making opportunity. Governments, however, perceive Star TV as a commercial/economic enterprise, and their policy responses have also been governed by this perception. Efforts made by governments so far have been either to strengthen domestic broadcast systems, or to control cable systems that function as carriers for satellite signals. No attempt has been made to apply the provisions of international law which guarantee nations the right of prior consultation and consent to satellite broadcasting or to evolve supranational regional regulatory frameworks. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/KRN)

Education systems in under-resourced environments face several challenges, some of them exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A possible way to address some of the challenges is to apply information and communication technologies. However, effectively integrating technology into education systems is a complex task. In this paper, factors contributing to successful integration of technology in education are explored, with a focus on under-resourced contexts. Case studies of successful technology implementation in education systems are discussed and analyzed to identify the factors that drive success. The analysis is framed using the reform strategy offered by The World Development Report 2018 ("Learning to Realize Education's Promise"). This is expected to provide policymakers and practitioners a way to align their education technology initiatives and strategies with the larger education reform agenda. Key lessons identified from the analysis are as follows. First, it is necessary to articulate "what" precisely does the technology intervention change/enable. Second, it is important to better understand the context to develop technologies and implementation strategies that fit the operating context. Third, it is essential to regularly monitor and evaluate programs and to feed that information into continuously improving design and implementation. Fourth, through the entire cycle of technology implementation, stakeholders must be consulted, understood, and empowered. However small the intervention, realizing the potential of technology tools in education requires keeping in mind the big picture offered by these lessons. [For "Learning to Realize Education's Promise. World Development Report, 2018," see ED604389.]

In many Asian countries the ratio of male to female population is higher than in the West: as high as 1.07 in China and India, and even higher in Pakistan. A number of authors (most notably Amartya Sen) have suggested that this imbalance reflects excess female mortality and have argued that as many as 100 million women are "missing." This paper proposes an explanation for some of the observed overrepresentation of men: the hepatitis B virus. I present new evidence, consistent with an existing scientific literature, that carriers of the hepatitis B virus have offspring sex ratios around 1.50 boys for each girl. This evidence includes both cross-country analyses and a natural experiment based on recent vaccination campaigns. Hepatitis B is common in many Asian countries, especially China, where some 10-15 percent of the population is infected. Using data on prevalence of the virus by country and estimates of the effect of hepatitis on the sex ratio, I argue that hepatitis B can account for about 45 percent of the "missing women": around 75 percent in China, between 20 and 50 percent in Egypt and western Asia, and under 20 percent in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. (Contains 29 notes, 12 tables, and 3 appendixes.)

The Asia-Pacific region hosts the largest number of refugees and displaced people in the world, and is the place of origin for nearly half of all international migrants. However, data related to the unique language-in-education needs of refugee and migrant children in and from this area is sparse. The report aims to create a stronger knowledge base to support Member States as they formulate education policies that are responsive to the needs of such children. It aims to: (1) Examine how linguistic diversity and human mobility intersect and impact minority, migrant and refugee children's access to quality, inclusive education; (2) Link policy priorities to promising practices, based on international frameworks and lessons learned from successful programmes; and (3) Recommend steps for improving language-in-education policies and their implementation. [Funding for this paper was also provided by UNICEF's East Asia and Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO).]

This literature review interrogates current international writing about inclusive education (IE) in regional and remote settings, with explicit reference to Australian considerations, including the emergent National Curriculum. The task of this review has been to establish the types of knowledge reported about IE in minority, marginalized and "other" inclusive educational settings, and to locate the absences of knowledge that the current literature indicates. Finally, future directions for research into IE in minority educational settings are proposed. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

The purpose of this study is to investigate elementary students' explanations of how physical features of the land influence the location of humanly defined structures including trade routes, such as the silk routes. The silk routes were a series of caravan trade routes that extended from Turkey to China and were located as far south as India and as far north as Russia. The trade activity on these routes ebbed and flowed depending on the protection available from the rulers of China. The routes existed from the 2nd century B.C.E. to the 15th century C.E. when they were replaced by maritime trade routes. Four teachers, two sixth grade, one fourth grade and one multi-level bilingual teacher, used a geography lesson on the silk routes with thirty-eight students, eight sixth graders, five fourth graders and twenty-five multi-level bilingual students, who were primarily Spanish speakers. The students were asked first to consider physical maps of China and central Asia and consider several questions based on the area's terrain. The students were then asked to locate western Turkey and Xian, the old capital of China. Working in pairs they determined a route from one place to the other taking into consideration terrain, climate and a lack of mechanized transportation. In completing this assignment the sixth graders had more prior knowledge of China because it is part of their curriculum in the sixth grade. Also they had more knowledge of maps. They had some difficulties with scale and did not at first take into full consideration the topography of the area the silk routes crossed. Several of the fourth graders were able to draw a route from Turkey to China that closely approximated one of the historic trade routes. As the sixth graders did, they had difficulties with scale. Some thought that it would be feasible to walk from Turkey to China. The bilingual students needed reinforcement of the maps with other maps and could have used more visual aids, showing the rued Tianshan and Himalayan mountain ranges and the forbidding climate of the deserts of central Asia. The bilingual teacher supplemented the maps with a map analysis sheet and some of the students were able to approximate the silk routes. All of the students in the study needed to extend their investigation with more visual materials so that their understanding of the silk routes could be extended.

Records show that school enrollment for girls is still lagging behind in some areas in the Asia and Pacific region, which poses challenge for the region to achieve Education for All (EFA) by 2015. And girls' labor in the Asia and Pacific region continues to constitute a major obstacle towards gender parity in education, another EFA target. Girls' labor is often hidden, unvalued and uncounted. Girls involved as household and commercial labor, are often exposed to abuse and exploitation. And both poverty and the tradition that women are generally low in status contribute to female child employment. This brief summarizes the causes and consequences of girls' child labor on their educational opportunities and describes some of the instruments and strategies to get girls into school. It also provides case examples from India and the Philippines, in order to assist policy makers and practitioners to better understand and address the issues. It is important to obtain credible data on girls' child labor in order to stop it from happening. Policy makers are urged to take measures and inter-sectoral efforts, not only to stop female child labor, but also to facilitate education for girls in a safe and protected environment. A list of useful web sites, papers, and publications is included. (Contains 2 footnotes.) [This document was published by the UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education and is part of the UNESCO Bangkok Asia-Pacific Programme of Education for All.]

A discussion of the Sindhi language diaspora, the biradari, across India and Pakistan looks at the implications of this geographic dispersal for the cohesion of the Sindhi-speaking community and culture. Three sociocultural characteristics of the scattered population are identified: urbanization; near-universal literacy; and bilingualism. Patterns of ethnic/linguistic identity and language choice in various cultural circumstances are also examined. Rapidly changing patterns of ethnic mix in previously Sindh areas are identified. It is concluded that information technology offers a means for continued connection and networking within the now geographically dispersed Sindh community. Contains 17 references. (MSE)

The article presents news briefs related to financial performance of companies and equity market in India and Asia, as of April 14, 2017. Rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and North Korea affected the Asian markets on April 14. Reliance Power Ltd. posted an increase of 5.79 percent in its total consolidated income for the fourth quarter of 2016-2017, in comparison to the last quarter. State-owned Oil India Ltd. managed to raise 500 million dollars through overseas bonds.