Actuación en el desarrollo del acto judicial

In many developing countries including India, family background factors, such as level of income, parents level of education and ethnicity have been found to be important factors in determining learning outcomes. Parents’ decision making is often based upon economic conditions. There have been several studies of primary schooling in India. Many educational features, scenarios and phenomenon are quite similar in South Asian countries particularly in India, and Nepal.

In India Jagannadhan (1986) studied a sample of 614 urban students of Grades VI and VII recorded their scores on standardised achievement tests. He divided the sample students into categories by parental characteristics and computed the mean achievement scores of pupils in different categories as well as correlation coefficients between achievement score and parental characteristics. He found that pupil achievements were systematically related with father’s income, education and occupation as well as with the newspaper and magazine subscription of the household.

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Govinda and Varghese (1993) found that learning outcomes were also influenced by a range of factors including quality of educational facilities, teacher attendance, socio-economic contexts, parental education, family size, attendance, household duties, nutrition and attendance at pre-school. Learning levels were very low, particularly in the rural areas and for disadvantaged ethnic minorities and scheduled castes in India. Despite gains in the access of children to schooling, a large number of ethnic minorities and especially girls still faced difficulties in attending school and continuing their studies for completion of primary level education.

Kingdon (1994), suggested that ‘the overwhelming drop-out may occur partly due to the very low quality of schools which implies low economic returns to schooling. Low quality, at least in terms of school’s physical facilities and teaching materials, may be due to the disproportionately large subsidies to higher education which reduce the resources available to the rest of the education sector’.

The Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE,1999), was the first serious evidence-based study of the state of primary schooling quality in India. It was based on a survey of schooling facilities in 242 villages across five north Indian states: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in 1996. It found very poor school infrastructure, e.g. 26% of schools did not have a blackboard in every classroom, 52% had no playground, 59% no drinking water, 89% no toilet, 59% no maps or charts, 75% no toys, 77% no library and 85% no musical instruments.

Kingdon, in a series of studies in India, (Dreze and Kingdon, 2001; Kingdon, 2005; 2007) showed that primary school attendance rates were considerably lower in the populous northern states of India, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and were unequally distributed. The learning achievement in primary schooling was very low, because of poor-quality schooling and school facilities. Inputs were low and teacher absenteeism was high. Demand and supply factors were important in explaining schooling participation. Private schools achieved significantly better academic results by relating teacher pay to achievement while government schools did not. The most likely explanation for this is that salaries proxy for teacher quality: raising wages encourages better quality candidates to apply for teaching positions, thereby raising the average quality of teachers. Current attendance rates were a more

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reliable indicator of schooling participation than enrolment rates, since large enrolment rates measured at the start of the school year could mask non- attendance and /or drop-out later in the school year.

The School Teacher Effectiveness and Learning Levels (TELLS) survey (Kingdon et al 2008) visited schools four times in a year and systematically tested primary school teachers’ knowledge of the subject matter that they taught. Language and arithmetic tests were especially designed to test teachers’ ability to explain and teach these subjects, and their ability to spot the mistakes that the children commonly made. The survey collected data from both government and private schools, a total of 160 schools (80 schools in Bihar and 80 schools from Uttar Pradesh). The children were tested at Grade II and IV in two subjects’ language (reading) and numeracy (maths). The study found, extremely low rates of school attendance among enrolled children; only 26% in Bihar and 44% in Uttar Pradesh (UP) attended school regularly. It is interesting to note that there was low attendance despite incentives (free school meals, uniforms, scholarships and textbooks). Similarly, teachers were absent more than one in five days in both states.

Learning achievement was low particularly at Grade IV (for example students who had not mastered even Grade II level basic skills enrolled at Grade VI). In terms of teacher competencies and knowledge only 28% of teachers could correctly do an area problem which is usually introduced in Grades IV and V.

Goyal (2007) also writing about India found that parents selected particular roles for their children, such as school or work or both in an attempt to optimize inadequate household resources and that this sometimes disrupted children’s schooling. Furthermore, the research found that parents’ or the household head’s lack of education reduced the probability of attending school. Similarly, the higher the age of the head of the household, the lower the probability of children working and, conversely, the higher their probability of attending school. Analysis of the reading and mathematical scores in different behaviour settings of primary schools indicated that the scores in non-government-aided private schools for fifth grade students were better than those of public schools. The student scores in schools with higher pupil teacher ratio were lower than with lower pupil teacher ratios, the scores were

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higher in schools with a greater percentage of teachers who were graduates, and the scores of general category students were higher than those of scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) categories.