Project Description & Rationale:
Our project revolves around the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the quality of primary and secondary school education across the globe. Through our research, we seek to examine how schools and educational institutions in different countries have responded to the threat of the pandemic, how they have managed to continue providing education to students during the pandemic, with a specific focus on how these decisions were influenced by countries’ economic statuses.
We chose the topic of global education during the pandemic because of its relevance to our current experience as students ourselves whose educational experience has been severely impacted as a result of the pandemic. From extended school closures to adjusting to various often less-than-optimal remote learning experiences, the decrease in quality of and access to education is an experience students all over the world can relate to, thus spurring us to investigate how exactly different countries are handling the education of their students amidst this global health crisis.
Our dataset for this project is the Central for Global Development’s COVID-19 Education Policy Tracking and is relevant to our project as it provides crucial information relating to the relationship between economic status and educational policies across the globe, including the dates and durations of primary and secondary school closures and opening in different countries, COVID-19 case counts at the times of school closures and openings, the various alternatives to in-person education different countries have employed, as well as countries’ economic status (as per the World Bank categorization) into low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income groups. Thus, drawing together our research interests and the information collected within our dataset, we developed the following research questions:
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Has the economic status of the country affected when its schools were closed? If so, how?
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Has the economic status of the country affected how education is delivered after school closures?
UCLA DH 150: Group Education
About Our Project
Significance
The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on global education systems, with the World Bank declaring that “COVID-19 has created the worst crisis to education and learning in a century”(World Bank, 2020). Countries across the world have scrambled to put measures in place to protect their citizens and improve public health safety, as a result of which the conventional modes of in-person education have been renounced in favor of remote learning alternatives.
The quality of these alternatives, and in turn, the quality of children’s educational experiences, depends heavily on the extent of resources countries can afford to dedicate to education in the midst of a pandemic. The global education crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic thus represents a drastic and serious interruption to the quality and accessibility of education to students across the globe, an interruption that as yet has no end date. An examination of countries’ differential responses and accommodations for education in the face of the pandemic - as our project attempts to do - will thus serve as a source of information as well as a critical analysis of the pressures of the pandemic on global education.
Audiences
We expect that our audience will be composed of students, educators and potentially policy makers seeking an understanding of the economic impact of COVID-19 on global education. Our investigation can be used to address questions relating to the relation between economic status and adherence to public health safety guidelines (specifically relating to the closure of educational institutions) and the relation between economic status and the educational accommodations and alternatives offered by countries across the world.
Audiences
Policy Makers
Educators
Students
Technical Specifications
Our data is in an Excel format. We decided to use R as our tool to perform statistical analysis because it is easy to do data wrangling and can output meaningful graphs and charts quickly. The built-in functions for statistical analysis also made R a more convenient tool compared to Excel. We decided to use Tableau for our dashboard since Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that has multiple data source connections. It also has a thriving community and forum that can help answering our questions when needed.
In order to analyze the relationship between a country’s income level and its education policy and confirmed cases at closure from different perspectives, we decided to use various analytical methods including boxplot, contingency table, chi-square test, and ANOVA table through Rstudio. The chosen statistical methods allow us to test our hypotheses and determine whether or not the results are statistically significant. This, then, will help us determine whether reasonable correlations may exist between a country's economic status and its approach to education during the pandemic.