Wellbeing and Student Achievement: Evidence from refugee students in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Jordan and the West Bank

Background:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) manages refugee camps across five Fields (Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank), where there are currently more than 1.5 million people residing (Berg et al., 2022). One of the key services provided by UNRWA is education, which includes more than 700 schools, 20,000 educators, and 545,000 pupils (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2019).

In 2022, Sandoval-Hernandez was a member of an advisory board that oversaw the creation, implementation, preliminary analyses, and dissemination of UNRWA's system-wide Assessment of Learning Outcomes (ALO). Subsequent discussions with the Directors of Education for each of the five Fields demonstrated the importance of students' well-being, the necessity to make policy decisions that are supported by empirical evidence and the technical limitations of the UNRWA team. This project will supplement UNRWA's expertise (in-depth understanding of the situation and the present policy climate) with advanced quantitative methods and policy theory to produce the evidence to inform policy development in the UNRWA education system.

Research Questions:
This study will analyse ALO data to evaluate the impact of well-being services on educational outcomes. From the lens of policymaking, it is crucial to understand the impact of public investment to ensure policies effectively improve the well-being levels of students.
This study seeks to address the following research questions:

1. Does investing in the improvement of student well-being have a causal effect on student educational outcomes?

2. Is there any heterogeneity in the effects based on gender or grade (primary v/s lower secondary)?

3. How do the impacts compare to other micro-teacher/student-level interventions in the context of the UNRWA education system in improving educational outcomes? Are high-capital investments more cost-effective than low-cost interventions?


Study Design:

This study will consist of two components. First, data from the ALO study will be analysed to understand the impact of well-being on student achievement. This data is available for 2019 and 2022, with further data becoming available in 2024, and is representative at the UNRWA system level, and for each of the five Fields. This captures enrolment, dropout status, student achievement in Arabic and Mathematics and various family and school variables.

The first component will utilise a difference-in-difference approach to analyse the ALO data. This will help to identify the impact of student well-being on various outcomes of interest after controlling for possible/available characteristics. This analysis will also design a school well-being availability index, using item response theory (IRT) (Kean and Reilly, 2014) for the variables of interest pertaining to well-being initiatives in UNRWA schools.

The second component is qualitative research consisting of semi-structured, open-ended, in-depth interviews conducted with stakeholders of the school system across the five Fields. The subjects for the interviews will be chosen based on the purposive sampling technique.

Collaboration and Impact

This research will involve an overseas visit that will be conducted to collaborate with INERI (International Educational Research and Evaluation Institute), which will provide training in advanced quantitative methods and substantive knowledge exchange regarding the secondary analysis of the data.

Additionally, a visit to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) will take place during this research. This is to learn from the vast technical experience available at UIS, as well as to share results of my research to assist UIS with addresses the challenge posed by the UN's sustainable development goals of providing quality education to all.