Learning from Local Practices : Improving Student Performance in West Bank and Gaza

The motivation for this study is to contribute to the preparation of the new Palestinian Education Strategy by shedding light on the school and classroom level factors that influence student learning, and to identify good practices that can be generalized from high-performing classrooms to those that need improvement. While most Palestinian children are in school, performance on assessments indicates that many of them are not learning as much as they could. This represents not only inefficiency in the use of public resources, but also a lost opportunity for individual students and the society as a whole. The current study was carried out by the Assessment and Evaluation Department (AED) of the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE) with technical and financial support from the World Bank. The analysis presented in this paper was prepared by the World Bank team as a complement to a previous paper prepared by a team of experts from AED. For the purposes of this study, schools were classified by student performance in TIMSS 2011 and the 2012 Palestinian national exams. Classroom and school-based tools were then used to gather information from both high and low-performing schools. A total of 122 public, private and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools were surveyed using four different instruments: (i) stalling's classroom observations; (ii) school leadership survey; (iii) teacher survey; and, (iv) school facilities survey, which are all provided in annex one.