Hanoi – January 2014. Mekong Development Research Institute (MDRI) has completed the independent impact evaluation for the first year of Vietnam Escuela Nueva Project (VNEN.
VNEN is a large education project funded by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and carried out nationwide by the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam (MOET) with support from the World Bank (WB). The project aims at improving teaching and learning capacity in primary schools. VNEN centers on students and stimulates the independence and creativity of children. The result of the project will serve as a useful lesson for the Government of Vietnam (GOV) in education reform. The impact assessment of the project in 2013-2014 school year has laid the foundation for the evaluation of the entire project.
In this project, MDRI has continued to demonstrate its high level of proficiency in impact evaluation and survey. Our experts established the framework for Project Impact Assessment. Our survey team recruited and trained 240 interviewers in organizing exams and doing in-person interviews with primary students of various ethnic groups, primary teachers, school principals. We successfully coached interviewers to organize specialized exam papers designed by VNEN specialists for primary students. Within a short period of about 3 weeks, we carried out the survey simultaneously in the North, Central and South of Vietnam. Our enumerators held the exams for more than 20,000 students and interviewed about 15,000 students and more than 6,000 teachers at 651 primary schools in 51 provinces across Vietnam. We also employed the latest data collection method using tablet, which helped us supervise the enumerators and control the data quality in real time. This project marked another milestone in the development of MDRI as we successfully applied our extensive expertise in the area of education.
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