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Solange Lima and Joana Costa

Date: 
Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 9:00am to 10:20am
Quarter: 
Winter 2019
Location: 
LC Conference Room

Joana Simoes de Melo Costa, Lemann Center Visiting Scholar
Solange Lima, Lemann Center Visiting Student Researcher

Inequality at secondary education: How are different socioeconomic backgrounds related to gaps in access, dropout and achievement?

The inequality of opportunity concept establishes that some sources of inequality are considered more unacceptable than others. As such, differences in educational outcomes that are related to circumstances beyond individual control such as socioeconomic background would be considered unfair and illegitimate. This presentation produces evidence of the relationship between poor secondary education outcomes and socioeconomic status and discusses how previous deficits are relevant for academic performance at secondary school.

Joana Costa is a researcher at IPEA (Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada). She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from PUC-Rio. Previously, she has worked at International Poverty Centre (UNDP-Ipea) on projects related to gender inequalities and poverty (2004-2009). She is currently at Social Policy and Studies Area/IPEA where she is mostly working with impact evaluation of social policies. She has evaluated educational, labor and health policies. Her currently research also includes studies on youth educational and labor market decisions, and educational inequalities at secondary education.

High school as a constructionist environment 

This research is a case study of a series of interventions at a low SES public high school in the Northeast of Brazil.  As one of the biggest challenges in Brazilian education, high school results from Ideb reveal that the country has not made significant improvements despite the higher investments. The idea started as a partnership between a research team from the Federal University to understand the school affordances and propose teaching resources with technology. The project lasted 2 years and evolved to encompass a network within academia and industry to co-design with the researchers, teachers and students enhanced learning experiences. The analysis of this experience might help educators to understand innovative teaching and learning and how to create an environment where teachers feel confident to innovate within their pedagogical practice to make it transformative for the students.