Social Origins and Mathematical Performance in Benin: Second Year of Primary Schooling Case Study

Recent decades have seen enormous progress in the implementation of Benin’s education reform known as the New Program of Study where the focus was on the first year of primary school when the reform began in 1999. Despite commendable efforts to improve children’s academic skills in French and Mathematics, the challenge of mathematical performance remains. This research project aims at understanding if pupils of different parental backgrounds achieve different outcomes and what are the contributions of these parental involvement to math performance. The pilot phase of the study will be conducted in primary schools of the Couffo department in Benin namely, in the municipalities covered: Aplahoue, Djakotomey, Dogbo, Klouekanmey, lalo, and Toviklin. The team will perform Group Randomized Control Trials (GRCTs) on the school level with an experiment sample consisting of three subgroups of schoolchildren; (a) low parental support, (b) higher parental support, and (c) control group. There are 576 school children (396 treated and 180 non-treated) by gender and 36 schools which will participate in the pilot phase. Data will be collected from both children (by Early Grade Math Assessment tests which is an internationally standardized test), parents, and admin records. This pilot survey will help them make necessary adjustments to the intervention before they run the full randomized evaluation and extend it to other departments on the national level.