Comparing Test Scores Before & After Kasadwini Atenaeɛ

Difference-making is hard to quantify. People, and especially donors, love to see numbers—they’re tasty, convenient, empirical morsels that satisfy the left hemisphere of our brains into believing that our money and faith are in the right place. There are two problems with statistics, though: 1) they are often hard to gather and can fit the subject awkwardly when forced, and 2) they don’t tell much of the story. People aren’t numbers and reducing them to that often works against the aims of a humanitarian organization. This is why we started the post series Atenaeɛcdotes, to tell some of the stories coming out of our language arts center, Kasadwini Atenaeɛ. That said, when Kumi sent me the table below with a breakdown of test scores, saying “Kasadwini Atenaeɛ has made a big difference in Asisiriwa,” I had to smile.

About the Ghanaian education system

The education system in Ghana is broken up into primary school, junior high school (JHS), and senior high school (SHS). The Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) is taken after the third year of JHS—called form 3—and takes place in June (although it was pushed back to September in 2020 due to the pandemic). The BECE is a big deal. This one series of tests determines whether a student can go on to senior high school and which schools they qualify for.

How Kasadwini Atenaeɛ fits into the test score analysis

We built Kasadwini Atenaeɛ on the grounds of the Asisiriwa D/A JHS (the “D/A” marks it as a public school). We opened the library in March of 2019 and the classroom, which offers classes in Twi and English language arts, in February of 2020. That’s what makes this table, showing the cumulative BECE passes and fails in Asisiriwa by subject in the years 2018-2020 so fascinating:

Let me give a couple disclaimers. First, I don’t believe that test scores are an accurate measurement of the education an individual has received or how intelligent they are; they show retention of particular information the state wants them to be able to regurgitate at a particular time. A lot of people smarter than me have written whole volumes about this. Secondly, I don’t think that Untold International can take all the credit for the increase in test scores. The Asisiriwa D/A JHS has a number of talented staff and teachers dedicated to the success of their students, and the headmaster, Noah Owusu Boateng, is constantly looking for ways to improve things.

Okay, now we can get giddy about the data.

Breaking down the test score data

You’ll see that there are 8 subjects—8 different tests—that are part of the BECE. While the students of Asisiriwa were strong in Mathematics back in 2018, they were comparatively weaker in other subjects, especially in English Language, Basic Design and Technology (BDT), and Religious and Moral Education (RME). The number of students who passed in these subjects began climbing in June 2019, three months after we opened the village library. Scores in Social Studies and General Science skyrocketed during this time.

When we move to September 2020, eighteen months after we opened the library and seven months after we opened the classroom, we see some really interesting stuff. The number of students who passed their English Language tests quintupled in two years, going from 15.4% to 100%! The number of students passing Basic Design and Technology doubled in 2019 and then tripled again in 2020. While the number of students passing Ghanaian Language (which is Twi in this community) didn’t rise in 2019, it doubled in 2020 after we started teaching Twi courses.

Going beyond the test scores…

I have to give most of the credit for these gains to our staff members: our librarian, Kumi, and our teacher, Mary. While we as an organization have provided some important material things (a cool building, a well-stocked library of books, puzzles, etc.), Kumi and Mary are the ones working with the students of Asisiriwa every single day, both in Kasadwini Atenaeɛ and lending their services as teachers in the school. We closed Kasadwini Atenaeɛ during the full pandemic lockdown in 2020, but when the Ghana Education Service opened schools just for form-3 students who needed to take their BECEs several months later, Kumi and Mary offered one-on-one tutoring for them at Kasadwini Atenaeɛ. They always make themselves available to students eager to learn, or those crippled by the anxiety the BECEs bring. I think this one-on-one tutoring with Kumi and Mary was the reason the students in 2020 were able to put up such phenomenal test scores, despite a pandemic that was decimating students’ learning opportunities around the world.

So, yes, Untold is making a quantifiable difference in Asisiriwa, but it’s only because we have quality people unlocking imaginations on the ground day after day and they, in turn, have support from people like you giving one dollar a month. To all of our donors, thank you. Because of you, the number of tests passed went from 157 to 303 in two years and a whole lot more kids were given the opportunity to attend high school!