DDP 739. Conrad Wesley Snyder, Jr. "Structuring Possibilities in the Classroom: Evaluation of a Prescriptive Instructional Reform Program for an Impoverished Educational Environment." February 2000. 29 pp.

The Namibian Basic Education Support (BES) Project undertook the monumental task of creating and implementing a new grade 1-4 instructional program in mathematics, environmental studies, and local languages’ literacy in less than five years. Little time, few resources, almost no local technical talent, weak leadership, and general resistance to the idea of Systematically-Designed, Structured Instructional Materials (SIMs) characterized the reform environment. The scripted SIMs were aimed at improving teacher and instructional effectiveness in contexts typified by under-educated and under-qualified teachers and resource-poor instructional programs. Evaluation results indicated that SIMs helped teachers in their classroom methods and produced higher student attainment in mathematics and environmental studies in grade 1 and grade 2. Because SIMs was considered inconsistent with reigning interests and ideologies by key central authorities, this effective reform will be ignored in the near future. In a highly politicized environment, specific reforms can be intentionally planned as strange loops.

Keywords: educational reform, curriculum and instruction, educational development

JEL Code: I20

Wes Snyder is a Faculty Associate at HIID and Research Professor of Education at the University of Montana. He is currently heading a monitoring and evaluation training program in Ghana under the USAID Quality Improvement of Primary Schools (QUIPS) Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) Project with HIID, Assistant Director of the NASA Earth Observing System Education Project, and co-director of the NASA Earth Science Enterprise Program at the University of Montana. Wes Snyder served as Chief of Party of the BES Project for HIID from 1986 to 1988.

The Institute for International Research of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) was the prime contractor for the BES Project, with HIID as a subcontractor. A version of this paper was used by AIR as the final report.