Arabic language skills: a comparative study of community and government schools in rural Upper-Egypt

ABSTRACT

Egypt has long promised quality basic education. Nevertheless, international and national assessments show poor reading skills. Community schools (CS) are a component of Egypt’s Education for All strategy. CS were intended to offer quality education to children who otherwise would have no chance to complete primary school. Previous studies report that academic abilities of Egyptian CS students exceed those of students in mainstream government primary schools. However, over time the education environment in Egypt has changed and the CS have changed with it. The current role and quality of CS education have been questioned. We examine core Arabic language skills of community and mainstream school students in two Upper-Egyptian villages. Results for students in mainstream schools are poor; results for CS students are significantly worse. We examine domains of Arabic language learning to understand specific problem areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Basic education
• Egypt
• government schools
• community schools
• Arabic
• reading skills

Acknowledgments

Helen Abadzi, Thomas DeVere Wolsey, and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Of course, any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Almost all CS students are girls. The few boys who study in CS might have confounded the results, given widely identified gender differences in maths and language ability (UNESCO 2018).

2. The long exam does not test ‘reading’ per se, but the students’ understanding of oral Arabic, and ability to answer questions. Differences in scores between the short and long exams may reflect this.

3. Cheating is most evident in the maths exams, though there are indications of cheating on the Arabic exams as well. Appendix A presents examples of suspected cheating. All appendices are available from the corresponding author.

4. A new curriculum has been introduced. We used the old curriculum that these students studied.

5. Additional information about multiple choice questions is presented in Appendix B.

6. We do not have data for some commonly considered domains such as fluency and prosody. The domains studied here are described in the remainder of the paragraph.

7. For example, analysis of non-response seems particularly revealing when the level of non-response is much higher in the short exam than in the long exam. We assume (though this may be incorrect) that students are unable to read the questions in the short exam, but feel able to answer when questions are read to them, as in the long exam.

8. A detailed description of Figure 1 is in Appendix D.

9. Recall that comparisons of the results of one exam with those of another exam, may not be legitimate. We believe, however, that this comparison is worth considering.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from UNWomen to the Cairo office of CARE International.Fatma Abdelkhalek’s work is funded by: 1) the National Research Development and Innovation under the auspices of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology (TUDFO/51757/2019-ITM, Thematic Excellence Program), Hungary; and 2) The EFOP-3.6.2-16-2017-00015-HU-MATHS-IN Hungarian Industrial and Innovation project under the auspices of the István Széchenyi University, Györ.