Student Achievement
One indicator of schooling quality is students’ scores on internationally, standardised or
nationally comparable tests of achievement in knowledge, skills, behaviour, and attitudes.
The effects of non-school inputs, such as parental background, would have to be held
constant to isolate the effect of schooling on test scores. The tests of cognitive
achievement are good predictors of students’ future earnings (Bishop, 1992); Boissiere,
Knight, & Sabot, 1985). Evidence also shows that test scores are highly correlated with
economic performance in aggregated data. Hanushek and Kimko (2000) find that test
scores are positively related to growth rates of real per capita GDP in cross-country. This
indicates that the quality of education, in addition to the quantity, is an important
ingredient of human capital formation.
School Resources
Resources available to the students in schools can influence students’ achievement.
Various indicators such as pupil-teacher ratios, expenditure per pupil, teacher salary and
educational level, availability of teaching materials can measure these resources.
Although certain teaching strategies can be effective even for very large classes, students
are often unruly in these settings. Moreover, teachers in large classes tend to focus more
on rote learning, rather than on problem solving skills (Psacharopoulos & Woodhall,
1985). Another resource of a school necessary for achieving quality is the intensity of
operation. The length of the term indicates how intensively schools are operated but can
also be a signal of how importantly school education is perceived in a society.
Pupil-Teacher Ratios
Actual class size may be larger than measured pupil-teacher ratios because of teacher
absenteeism and specialization.
On the other hand, class sizes would be lower than
observed pupil-teacher ratios in multiple-shift systems (where students attend school on
double or triple shift rather than at the same time). Some researchers argue that measured
pupil-teacher ratios are reasonable approximations of actual class sizes, especially, at
primary schools (Lockheed et. al., 1991). Education quality is much higher when the
pupil-teacher ratio is much lower and this improves students’ achievement.
School Enrolment
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One initial issue is the age at which children are enrolled for the first time. While primary
education is officially meant to start at age 5 or 6 in most countries, late enrolment is
common in Ghana, for a variety of reasons, e.g. Children’s participation in family
economic activities and the difficulty of walking to distant schools.