Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Social sciences Humanities and Education
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Reading Skills Performance Among Children with And Without Disabilities in Africa
Huafeng Zhang, Stein T. Holden
ABSTRACT:
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim for inclusive and equal access to education for all children, including children with disabilities. Recent studies have found significant achievement in school enrolment in African countries. However, little evidence is available on whether and to what extent the recent effort has improved children’s school performance and skill learning among children with disabilities.
This paper is based on the sixth round of Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS 6) conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 12 African countries (Central African Republic, Chad, DRCongo, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Togo, Tuisia, and Zimbabwe). Based on standard reading tests, we first assess the reading skills variation across African countries correlated to their different development level. Thereafter, we study the achievement gap in reading skills for children with disabilities. We try to explore to what extent different types of disabilities have influenced disabled children’s ability to acquire reading skills. Finally, we evaluate the roles of countries’ macro development indicators (national economy level, primary school enrolment and expansion, and overall skill performance) on the achievement gap between children with and without disabilities.
This paper shows that there are huge variations across African countries in reading skills performance. It also shows that the reading skills and the extent to which children with disabilities lag in reading skills varies with disability type. On average, children with hearing, intellectual, and multiple disabilities lag behind while children with vision and physical disabilities do not. Heyneman-Loxley effect indicated that in the low-income countries, national economic development level instead of family social-economic status has played predominant influence on children’s school achievement gap. Our paper suggests that in the low-income African countries, national economic development level is also the most crucial factor for improving disabled children’s school achievement.
keywords: reading skills learning, across-country comparison, children with disabilities, disability types, SDG, Africa, development