Q4
Does MTB MLE help girls achieve academic success in primary school?
In this section researchers looked for evidence that MTB MLE helps girls succeed in primary grades. Over the years, research studies have indicated that girls normally do just as well as boys in school when they can use their own language for learning in early grades. There is some evidence that MLE schools may help girls more than boys with respect to achieving academic success in early grades.
Figure 4( below) presents the results of assessments from three countries— Cameroon, Thailand and Viet Nam. Results are divided between girls( orange) and boys( blue). As before, the more lightly shaded bars show performance in non-MLE programmes( labeled“ standard”) and the darker bars show performance in MLE schools.
Figure 4: Boys and girls in MLE and non-MLE programmes
Kom G6 Math- Females
Cameroon
Thailand
Kom G6 Math- Males *************************
Kom G3 Language Arts- Females
Kom G3 Language Arts- Males *************************
PM G2 Social Studies- Females
Males- Standard Males- MT-medium Females- Standard Females- MT-medium
MTB MLE RESOURCE KIT Including the Excluded: Promoting Multilingual Education
Viet Nam
PM G2 Social Studies- Males *************************
PM G2 Science- Females
PM G2 Science- Males ************************* Viet Nam G2 Math- Females
Viet Nam G2 Math- Males
0 20 40 60 80 100
Group Averages( percent)
In all cases, girls in MLE schools did better in learning academic content than girls in non-MLE schools. In Figure 4, we see that girls in mother tongue schools made the most dramatic gains in Kom G3 Language Arts and Vietnam G2 Math. The smallest gains were seen in Kom G6 Math. The Patani Malay( PM) programme is interesting in that girls did better than boys in most subjects even in standard schools.
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