Title: Primary school achievements and the Millenium Development Goals in Africa

Authors: Jeffrey James

Addresses: Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Abstract: In the existing literature, the relationship between variations in educational achievements at a given grade level, tends to be divorced from the question of how such achievements are translated into those Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that involve primary education. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by studying both issues on the basis of a data set for nine African countries, that contains test scores for grade 4 students in each country. Using a simple graphical technique, these scores are then plotted against three MDGs, yielding an overview of the performance of the nine countries at each phase of the process as a whole.

Keywords: primary education; test scores; Africa; convergence; divergence; primary schools; Millenium Development Goals; educational achievements.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2006.011888

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2006 Vol.16 No.6, pp.421 - 438

Published online: 30 Dec 2006 *

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