Intervention(s)
This study is built upon the randomized scaling of school-based agricultural extension to examine the effects of adding an intervention called "Learning to Learn" that trains science and agriculture teachers in the general skills (rather than specific recipes) of providing student-centered, experiential learning experiences.
The school-based agricultural extension program is provided by 4-H Liberia. The 4-H Liberia program integrates experiential science education with the introduction of improved agricultural technologies, offering the promise to transform rural livelihoods and motivate school attendance. Specifically, the program trains agriculture and science teachers to implement a system of four components: experiential instruction of scientific knowledge, student-led school farms, student home projects, and extra-curricular activities to cultivate leadership and agribusiness skills. This system is then supported by regular visits from extension officers.
"Learning to Learn" is a one-year-long in-service teacher training intervention, combining three periods of intense study during term breaks with monthly in-service visits from tutors. Teachers study a subset of a curriculum titled Preparation for Social Action (PSA), implemented by the Center for Research in Education for Development. Teachers are trained to teach in a way that is inspired by the scientific method, emphasizing the use of precise language, posing sharp questions, framing precise hypotheses and using evidence to decide. To make this approach more effective, the teacher is encouraged to use examples from everyday life wherever possible, so that the questions, the hypotheses and the relevant evidence are likely to be concrete. The logic implicit in this approach is: teachers must first experience the learning environment they seek to deliver to the students. The training takes place through demonstrations, where the trainer takes the teachers through multiple instances of the method, applied to specific contexts.