This episode features RISE Research Fellow Yue-Yi Hwa in conversation with Jennifer Opare-Kumi, a final-year doctoral researcher at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.  They cover a breadth of issues including the potential for targeted instructional programs to contribute towards improved child mental health outcomes, why mainstreaming children’s mental health during early learning might improve their educational and other life outcomes, and the need to adopt an expanded view of the ‘learning crisis’ currently affecting countries in the global south.  

Links

• Jenn Opare-Kumi (webpage)
• Foundational Learning and Mental Health: Empirical Evidence from Botswana (working paper) by Jennifer Opare-Kumi
• Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills in Low-Income Countries: Measurement and Associations with Schooling and Earnings (journal article) by Alice Danon, Jishnu Das, Andreas de Barros, and Deon Filmer (RISE Pakistan)
• Socioemotional and Academic Learning Before and After COVID-19 School Closures (working paper) by Stephen Bayley, Darge Wole Meshesha, Paul Ramchandani, Pauline Rose, Tassew Woldehanna, and Louise Yorke (RISE Ethiopia)
• Researching Socio-Emotional Learning, Mental Health and Wellbeing: Methodological Issues in Low-Income Contexts (working paper) by Stephen Bayley, Darge Wole Meshesha, Louise Yorke, Paul Ramchandani, and Pauline Rose (RISE Ethiopia)
• Measuring the impacts of teachers in Vietnam: teacher value-added and student cognitive and non-cognitive skills (paper in progress) by Pedro Carneiro, Paul Glewwe, Anusha Guha, and Sonya Krutikova
• Youth Impact’s page on Teaching at the Right Level in Botswana (webpage)
• Teaching at the Right Level Africa (webpage)
• Pratham’s Combined Activities for Maximized Learning (CAMaL) teaching-learning approach (webpage)

Guest biography

Jennifer Opare-Kumi

Jennifer Opare-Kumi is a Doctoral Researcher at the Blavatnik School of Government. Driven by a passion for efficient, evidence-based policy making, she researches ways to improve education and mental health outcomes for young people in the Global South through government and non-governmental interventions and policies.

Yue-Yi Hwa

Yue-Yi Hwa is a Senior Education Specialist on the evidence translation and synthesis team at the What Works Hub for Global Education. Previously, Yue-Yi was a research fellow and research manager for Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE), where she focused on synthesising research on teachers and management. She has also been a research fellow for the Penang Institute in Kuala Lumpur and a secondary school English teacher in Selangor, Malaysia. She holds an MPhil in comparative government from the University of Oxford and a PhD...